Why does africa need sinclair?

John Sinclairs impact on lexicography in English as well as his pioneering work in corpus linguistics is well known. What is less widely known is his impact on dictionary making for languages other than English. In this article it is shown how Sinclairs revolutionary insights are being adopted and developed in the production of bilingual dictionaries for Bantu languages. This work has proceeded from a CilubDutch learners dictionary ten years ago to an online SwahiliEnglish work and a Northern SothoEnglish school dictionary. The latter has features that transcend the monolingual level, as corpus-based analyses in different languages have to be mapped onto one another. New questions arise as a result, which focus on the need to show idiomatic bilingual example sentences. A frequency-based approach to lexical and grammatical gaps is adopted, with a seamlessly integrated corpus-based dictionary mini-grammar. Not all problems have been solved, but the compilers find time and again that analysis of real data provides insights unavailable in an armchair-linguistics approach. It is exciting to join those riding the wave that was set in motion by Sinclair.