Langa Khumalo is a Full Professor and Executive Director of the South African Center for Digital Language Resources (SADiLaR) at the North-West University (NWU). SADiLaR is a national Research Infrastructure (RI) with a strategic function to stimulate and support research and development in the domains of human language technologies (HLT), natural language processing (NLP), and Digital Humanities (DH). Professor Langa Khumalo is the former Director of Language Planning and Development at the University of KwaZulu-Natal (UKZN).
He holds a PhD in Linguistics from the University of Oslo (Norway), an MPhil in Linguistics from Cambridge University (UK), a Masters in Africa Languages & Literature, and a BA Honors from the University of Zimbabwe, and a Certificate in Corpus Linguistics from The Tuscan Word Centre in Italy. He also completed an Oxford Strategic Leadership Programme (OSLP) at the Saïd Business School at Oxford University (UK) and is a member of the Oxford Business Alumni Network. He is the current Chair and Coordinator of the Africa Union (AU) IsiZulu Language Commission. He is an expert in Corpus Linguistics and Computational Solutions for the African Academy of Languages (ACALAN), which is the Secretariat of the AU. He is the immediate past Chair of the Universities South Africa (USAf)’s Community of Practice for the Teaching and Learning of African Languages (CoPAL). He is a Fellow of the Cambridge Commonwealth Society (FCCS), a former Language Champion in the Oxford Global Languages program (OGL) for Oxford University Press (UK), a member of the Scientific Board of the Centre for Advanced Studies of African Society (CASAS, University of the Western Cape), the current President of the African Association for Lexicography (AFRILEX), and a member of the inaugural Executive Committee of the Digital Humanities in Southern Africa (DHASA).
He served as a member of the Language Policy Review Working Group appointed by the Department of Higher Education and Training (DHET). He is an award-winning author in Intelligent Text Processing and Computational Linguistics. He is a recipient of the Staff Excellence Award (2018) for Excellence in Teaching in the College of Humanities at UKZN. He led the effort to develop African languages as languages of research, innovation, teaching and learning in Higher Education through an intellectualization programme at the University of KwaZulu-Natal that saw the development of human language technologies and advances in Machine Learning, and other digital solutions. He has received a Recognition Award from the University of the Free State (UFS) for his Contribution to Multilingualism nationally and internationally. He has just been appointed by the Department of Higher Education and Training (DHET) as a Member of the Advisory Panel for Language Policy Implementation effective from November 2023.
He has been an invited speaker and keynote speaker at various conferences and colloquia. He successfully applied for the ERAMUS+ Funding through an international collaboration between UKZN and three other South African Universities on the one hand (NWU, UWC and Rhode University), and Salamanca University in Spain, University of Groningen in the Netherlands, and Trinity College Dublin in Ireland.