Minority Reporter

Y’all gon’ learn Chinese… y’all gon’ speak Chinese

September 30, 2008 at 3:39 pm (Uncategorized) (african languages, chinese, english, grahamstown, internet, isixhosa, minority languages, rhodes university, translate@thon, users)

Check out the stats on internet users - broken down by language and the results don’t lead to jaws dropping in ‘shock horror and disbelief’. Instead it’s no surprise really that on this respective pie chart, Africa falls in the miscellaneously titled category of ‘rest of languages’ also known as ‘other’. 

Just like in primary school when you filled out those forms asking you to state your home language and race. Leaving the Chinese kids in my class to resort to filling in ‘other’, as they were not, well, officially black as yet.

But as we know, the Chinese in South Africa now qualify for the perks of Black Economics Empowerment (BEE) etc. and all the rest of the perks that come with being previously disadvantaged.

In the paper, Introduction to Minority Languages, Multimedia and the Web, the divide between languages in terms of online content and services is discussed. Specifically with regard to the ‘information rich’ and the ‘information poor’ languages:

Where content in the local language does not exist, there may be increased use of English (or the majority language of the region) by non-native speakers in both consumption… and production… thereby contributing to the language shift.

It seems that African languages can generally be classified as ‘information poor’, though some semblance of progress is being made on this front. You just need to get a thicker magnifying glass to see it that’s all – or borrow those coke-bottom spectacles from the bookworm the rugby boys used to promptly point and laugh at in early high school days.

There is a slow but noticeable development with regard to the imprint indigenous African languages are making on the net. An example being the translate@thon Rhodes University in Grahamstown and the University of Fort Hare Telkom Centres of Excellence in Alice held last year. 

This was so successful that this year saw a delegation from the Rhodes School of Languages, Education and Computer Science, as well as some members from the South Africa Norway Tertiary Education Development Programme team head to Makerere University in Uganda. To attend a Southern Region Education Board ICT-for-development conference where another translate@thon was birthed. This time with the aims of translating the Mozilla Firefox 3 Web browser into Luganda, a commonly spoken language there.  

The paper mentioned earlier also speaks of a study that was done. Which found:

Users have greater difficulty accessing content that is not in their native language and that there is a significant effect of domain knowledge in mitigating a lack of language ability.

The point? Yes, ‘tis true that no indigenous African languages feature in the ‘top-10-most-spoken-languages-in-the-world’ list. But then again, let’s not feign surprise here. The silver and the gold go to English and Mandarin respectively.  And Africa? Well, we’re trying, and in my books that counts for something.