Empowering African Languages: Humanities and Technologies

The main linguistic metadata repository, the Ethnologue, notes the following about languages in Africa: Population: 997,320,660; Living Languages: 2,146, of which 174 are listed as having official institutional status, 525 as developing, 1075 as ‘vigorous’: 1,075, 236 as ‘in trouble’, 136 as ‘dying’. And of course many are already extinct. Of the institutional languages, only six have any significant status in the digital world of Africa: the digitally empowered post-colonial languages English, French, Portuguese, Afrikaans (in close cooperation with Dutch), then Arabic, and Swahili is slowly catching up. The other languages are on the digitally powerless side of the digital divide.

However, though powerless in the digital world, all other African languages are just as valuable verbal, cultural and ethnic treasures for their populations as the empowered languages. Assuming, as we do, that the empowerment effort is worthwhile, the question addressed by this lecture arises: How can African languages be supported by text and speech technologies to empower their populations to participate in the global digital community of cultural exchange and scientific research?

The lecture addresses this issue on several levels:

First, justification of the question raised here, which goes well beyond customary views of language resource creation as 'documentation', 'maintenance' or 'revitalisation'.

Second, an overview of current developments at the social level, where the key to local language empowerment lies in the populations themselves and their governments, and, in the digital age, to a large extent with the communication conventions of young people, who invent phonemic transcriptions for text messages without linguistic training, for example.

Third, an overview of language resource creation activities in different countries in Africa, particularly South Africa, the West African countries Côte d'Ivoire, Ghana, Nigeria, the East African country Kenya, and the Arabic countries.

Fourth, specific developments in text and speech technology by African universities and companies, including software localisation by open source initiatives such as Linux, LibreOffice, and research initiatives by global companies such as Microsoft and Google, with examples of my own work in cooperation with African universities.

Fifth, and finally, tested and promising strategies which any of us can effectively adopt and promote in cooperative ventures in digital humanities, between the economically empowered side of the digital divide and the economically less empowered side.