Dr. Kea Seshoka Is the Director of the Language Directorate at North-West University (NWU). She is known as an African language activist and policy and planning expert. She has been instrumental in developing African languages-related projects, such as establishing the Language Unit at Road Accident Fund, and terminology developments in various entities and government departments. On top of that, she has extensive experience as a language practitioner and language specialist in the different government departments in South Africa. She has also been instrumental in terminology verification as an expert.

Furthermore, as a former linguist at the Parliament of South Africa, she has been instrumental in developing language-related innovations. Her work as the Director of the Language Directorate has entailed successfully reviewing the NWU Language Policy, which has enabled the adoption of the principle of functional multilingualism, which opens up for the use of English, Setswana, Sesotho, and Afrikaans as target languages of the NWU.

Elsabé Taljard is professor in the Department of African Languages, University of Pretoria, South Africa. Her language of specialization is Northern Sotho / Sepedi and her research interests are corpus linguistics, lexicography, terminology and human language technology. She has authored or co-authored 50 articles in accredited journals and regularly reads papers at national and international conferences. She has supervised a number of post-graduate students working on terminology related topics. She was one of the project leaders who compiled a multilingual Open Education Research Term Bank (OERTB) for South African university students. She is co-manager of the University of Pretoria Digitization node of SADiLaR, a government-funded project which has as its focus the creation of digital resources for the South African languages. She is also one of the editors of Lexikos, an accredited journal publishing articles with a focus on lexicography and terminology, and serves as on the board of the African Association for Lexicography (Afrilex). She currently serves as the chair of the Steering Committee responsible for the implementation of the Language Development Plan and revision of the language policy of UP.

Sinfree Makoni was born in Zimbabwe. He holds a BA in English (Hons) with a specialty in Linguistics from the University of Ghana, Legon, Accra, and a PhD in Applied Linguistics from Edinburgh University, Scotland. He taught at several universities in southern Africa, notably the University of the Western Cape, Bellville, and University of Cape Town. He was a postdoctoral Fellow at the Centre for Afro-American Studies at the University of Michigan. He is currently a Professor in the Department of Applied Linguistics and Director of the African Studies Program at Pennsylvania State University, Extraordinary Professor at University of the Western Cape and North-West University, and a Visiting Professor at Nelson Mandela University. He was a Carnegie Diaspora Fellow at Laikipia University, Kenya. He has published extensively in the areas of Language and Aging, Language and Security, Language Policy and Planning, Southern Epistemologies, and Decoloniality. His most recent publications include Innovations and Challenges to Applied Linguistics from the Global South (co-authored with A. Pennycook; London and New York: Routledge Press, 2020); Integrational Linguistics and Philosophy of Language in the Global South (S. Makoni, D. Verity, & A. Kaiper-Marquez, eds.; London and New York: Routledge Press, 2021); The Languaging of Higher Education in the Global South: De-Colonizing the Language of Scholarship and Pedagogy (S. Makoni, C. Severo, A. Abdelhay & A. Kapier-Marquez, eds.; London and New York: Routledge Press, 2022); Language in the Global Souths S. Makoni, A., Kaiper-Marquez, & L. Mokwena, eds., London and New York: Routledge Press, 2022); and Decolonial Voices, Language and Race (S. Makoni, M. Madany-Saa, B. Antia, & R. Gomez, eds., Bristol, UK: Multilingual Matters, 2022). He is the architect of the African Studies Global Forum, which seeks to engage scholars in both the Global North and Global South, and the co-editor of the new Multilingual Matters book series Global Forum on Southern Epistemologies. He currently serves as Associate editor of Applied Linguistics.