“The work that is being done by SWiP is highly commendable. The key message of today’s meeting for me is the importance of preserving our languages. As a Zulu speaker, it is crucial that isiZulu does not die.”
These are the words of Tholakele Nkwanyana, a lecturer in education and language development at North-West University (NWU) and one of the panellists at the SWiP side event of the Science Forum South Africa (SFSA) 2023.
SWiP, which is short for SADiLaR-Wikipedia-PanSALB, is a collaborative initiative by the South African Centre for Digital Language Resources (SADiLaR), Wikipedia and the Pan South African Language Board (PanSALB), aimed at promoting all South African indigenous languages online.
Launched in September 2023, the project endeavours to bring together communities of indigenous language users and give them the necessary skills to create and review content on Wikipedia. In doing so, participants will collectively increase their respective languages’ digital footprint.
“There is a serious lack of online presence when it comes to South Africa’s indigenous languages,” Lihle Sosibo, SADiLaR’s communication manager, said in her welcome speech and introduction to the SWiP meeting. “When we talk about language, we also talk about culture and identity. The SWiP project’s objective is to empower anyone who is interested in contributing content to Wikipedia in their own language; and, ultimately, to promote and preserve our indigenous languages and protect them from disappearing over time.”
Accessible knowledge for all
The one-day SWiP event comprised an exciting panel discussion by experts in the fields of preservation of languages, culture, and digitisation of information, and an introductory mini workshop to Wikipedia focusing on editing, translating, and making content available online.
Besides Tholakele Nkwanyana, the six-member panel also included Dumisani Ndubane, monitoring and evaluation strategist at the Wikimedia Foundation; Julius Dantile, executive head of languages at PanSALB; Marissa Griesel, project manager of the African Wordnet and Multilingual Terminology projects at UNISA; Prof Menno Van Zaanen, professor in digital humanities at SADiLaR; and Dr Laurette Marais, senior researcher at the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR).
Prof Laurette Pretorius, emeritus professor of computer science at UNISA, facilitated the panel discussion which was centered on different aspects of the theme - “Preserving languages and scientific information: accessible knowledge for all”.
“A language that doesn't cross the digital ocean, is a dead language,” the Wikimedia Foundation’s Dumisani Ndubane said. “For us to achieve a greater online presence for our indigenous languages, we need to fuse Wikipedia with education. We know through research that if someone cannot speak their language, and speak it properly by the fourth grade, they are less likely to speak any other language better; and they are particularly less likely to have a good proficiency in English, which translates in fewer economic opportunities for them later,” he explained.
If you want to preserve a language, use it!
Julius Dantile, the executive head of languages at PanSALB, emphasised the need for language and culture preservation in South Africa. “If you want to preserve a language, use it! You can’t develop a language that you don't use. For us to promote multilingualism, we need to develop it while we use it. That is what PanSALB stands for: it was established to promote and create conditions for the development and use of our official languages.”
Marissa Griesel, project manager of the African Wordnet and Multilingual Terminology at UNISA, discussed the use of African Wordnet to promote multilingualism in the classroom. “A wordnet is made up of basic building blocks called synsets. Just as in other electronic dictionaries, we have definitions and usage examples for each of the entries in a wordnet, but what makes this different is that the entries or concepts described are connected to each other via semantic relations.
“What makes African Wordnet special is that our indigenous languages are connected. A learner could learn another language from a language they already know. For example, they could learn isiZulu from Sesotho or Afrikaans, and thus acquire more knowledge in one of our other indigenous languages,” she explained.
Tholakele Nkwanyana shone a spotlight on the NWU’s strides towards multilingualism. “We have a very diverse community of students and staff members. We provide training for our lecturers and tutors, and pride ourselves in our interpreting services for educational purposes in our lecture rooms. Having interpreters comes with challenges, though, when it comes to terminology. So, we have embarked on a journey of developing (and standardising) terminology in the different languages.”
Prof Menno van Zaanen shared his personal journey from computer science to discovering the field of computational linguistics (CL), explaining how CL is used to analyse and build tools that investigate patterns in languages.
The final panellist, Dr Laurette Marais from the CSIR, gave a brief overview of the role computational grammars play in language and knowledge preservation. “It is possible to build a grammar where the rules in a language are about concepts, and there are also ways of linking these two kinds of grammars to encode knowledge.”
After a short question-and-answer session, Bobby Shabangu, president of the Wikimedia ZA Chapter, presented a mini workshop in which he introduced participants to the use of Wikipedia and its role in preserving language and culture.
“My biggest take of today's event was WordNet and Wikipedia,” said Ben Nkhumane, a principal language practitioner at the North West Department of Arts, Culture and Recreation. “We have a lot of translation work to do, and this is another giant step for us to take translation to the next level, using a different format.”
*The SWiP event was live streamed on YouTube for participants who were unable to attend in person. Watch the YouTube Stream here.
