Indigenous Languages Of South Africa Research Articles

Challenges in Intellectualizing Sesotho for Use in Academic Publications

This paper explores challenges in intellectualizing Sesotho for academic works beyond literary-based theses. It also overviews resources for the intellectualization of official Indigenous languages of South Africa, focusing on national translation projects for terminology development. Furthermore, it highlights efforts by the South African Centre for Digital Language Resources in creating and collecting corpora for all official languages, including Sesotho. Challenges in Sesotho lexicography, especially with corpus-based approaches, are discussed. Additionally, the paper reflects on the authors' experiences with publishing academic articles in Sesotho in South African journals. It discusses obstacles faced, and strategies employed, including dialogues with reviewers on creating new terms and choosing between Lesothan Sesotho and South African Sesotho orthographies. Finally, the essay addresses challenges posed by limited publication avenues for indigenous languages in southern Africa and academic pressures for citations and research impact. It aims to shed light on lesser-known Indigenous languages in Southern Africa by spotlighting challenges and solutions to academic publications in Sesotho. Overall, the paper concludes that efforts at intellectualizing Sesotho and other South African indigenous languages are evident. Even so, there is far less emphasis on using Sesotho and other indigenous languages for academic discourses.

Textism in the Classroom: A Writing Destruction for School Learners in South Africa

The rise of the Third Industrial Revolution (3IR) introduced various interactive digital platforms such as computer-mediated communication (CMC). These platforms include social media platforms such as Facebook, WhatsApp, X (formerly known as Twitter), and Instagram. During the exchange of messages, social media users use language distinctively to express their thoughts. Both conventional and non-conventional writing styles manifest. For instance, while others use well-formed language in line with the conventions of a standard language, some use unconventional language, which is termed multiple names such as textism, texteese, and social media language. Since most of the social media users’ age profiles match the age group of learners in secondary schools, it became necessary for this study to explore the possible impact of social media on learners’ academic writing, particularly in the official indigenous languages of South Africa. This study used a qualitative research approach to explore the impact of social media on learners’ writing of the Sepedi language in 10 secondary schools in the Limpopo Province, South Africa. Using focus group interviews and document analysis, the paper discovered that learners’ application of writing mechanics such as grammar and punctuation marks are affected by social media. The paper is conceptualised through cultivation theory.

Ethnolinguistic vitality in Thulamela Local Municipality: A case of Xitsonga

The use and status of a language in a given speech community can reveal the prospects of its elevation or lack thereof. Furthermore, one can determine whether a language will be elevated or undermined in a community by exploring the perceptions of its speakers towards its status and use. Hence, this article investigated the status and use of Xitsonga at the Thulamela Local Municipality (TLM) in the Limpopo Province of South Africa, with particular interest in the Vatsonga’s perceptions of the ethnolinguistic vitality of Xitsonga in the TLM. Guided by the Ethnolinguistic Vitality Theory, this article probed the demographics of Xitsonga in the TLM, explored the role played by the TLM authorities in promoting Xitsonga as a language, and highlighted the implications of the perceived ethnolinguistic vitality of Xitsonga in the TLM. The study employed a qualitative method to collect data through face-to-face semi-structured interviews from 13 Xitsonga L1 speakers who participated in the study. It was found that Xitsonga speakers preferred to be addressed in their language during the municipality’s formal gatherings – a courtesy they believe is both effective in and necessary for the preservation and promotion of Xitsonga at the TLM. Also noteworthy, despite Xitsonga being dominated by Tshivenḓa in the TLM, Xitsonga speakers nevertheless maintained positive perceptions towards their language. This is commendable, considering that the TLM is located in Ṱhohoyanḓou, the economic hub of Vhembe District, where there is a university, malls and shopping complexes – spheres that encourage acculturation and language shift.Contribution: The findings of this study may contribute to the ongoing discourse on the equal use, preservation, and promotion of indigenous languages in South Africa.

The use of technology to preserve indigenous languages of South Africa

Indigenous languages in South Africa must be preserved to ensure that they do not lose their identity and become extinct. The four indigenous languages with the fewest speakers among South Africa’s 12 official languages are: Xitsonga, Siswati, Tshivenḓa and isiNdebele. The preservation of these languages in South Africa has been a long-standing challenge because of various social and economic factors. With the advancement of technology, opportunities have arisen to preserve and promote the use of these languages. Therefore, this study explores various technological strategies that can be used to preserve the South African indigenous languages. These languages can be preserved by making them widely accessible to users through various strategies such as localisation of daily used technology, translation through crowdsourcing, digitisation and archiving. Digital learning tools such as machine translation (MT) and creating online dictionaries can also contribute to preserving these languages. Each of these strategies offers benefits on how technology could be employed effectively and facilitate the preservation of indigenous languages. This study demonstrates the significance of technology in preserving indigenous languages and promoting their use around the world.Contribution: This study fills the practical gap in the use of technology to adequately preserve minority indigenous languages of South Africa, namely, Xitsonga, Siswati, Tshivenḓa and isiNdebele. These languages do not receive much attention in terms of preservation using technology in South Africa. Therefore, the study provides practical technological strategies that need to be implemented to preserve the indigenous minority languages. The insight of this study into the use of technology to preserve South African languages fits well within the scope of Literator, which is to publish studies in linguistics and literature with a special focus on South African languages. This publication will bring solutions to how minority languages could be preserved in the context of South Africa.

The Ramifications of the Neglect of Indigenous South African Languages by the South African Government: COVID-19 as a Case Study

Since the outbreak of COVID-19 towards the end of 2019 and its proliferation across the globe, the lives of many populations have been disrupted, causing intense turbulence in social, economic and political dimensions. With that in mind, this article reflects on and problematises the neglect of the indigenous South African languages by the national government in mainstream communications on COVID-19. Qualitative research inquiry is utilised to explore the importance of indigenous languages in South Africa’s healthcare system. By the same token, an attempt to underline some of the predominant challenges within the selected phenomenon is argumentatively presented using a scoping literature review as a research technique. The findings and discussions indicate that the desolation of indigenous South African languages can be regarded as a repetitive episode of the (post)colonial injustices pertaining to indigenous South African languages as well as the healthcare system. Thus, the concluding remarks emphasise the urgency of inculcating indigenous South African languages into all communication systems, with special reference to the healthcare system.

An Hybrid Part of Speech Tagger for Setswana Language using a Voting Method

Part-of Speech (PoS) tagging is a corpus linguistics that deals with assigning appropriate lexical categories to each word in a sentence. To effectively address challenges associated with PoS tagging, several Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks modelling techniques have been employed, including Conditional Random Fields (CRF), Support Vector Machines (SVM), and Decision Trees in diverse languages. These PoS taggers implement the process of associating the correct PoS (nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, etc.) with each word in a sentence. However, creating language resources is an expensive process for many languages, including the indigenous languages of South Africa that are classified as resource-scarce. Therefore, using Setswana as a language with limited resources, this study explores and applies methods to increase the utilization of existing resources and tagger accuracy. This is done using Setswana's two PoS taggers: a Maximum Entropy (MaxEnt) and an SVM, which achieved an accurateness of 94.4 per cent and 95.59 per cent respectively. To find errors in the taggers, an error analysis is carried out. The Setswana PoS Tagger was then built using a voting algorithm to improve results and attain 97.06 per cent accuracy. The combination of taggers reduces the error rate by up to 2.01 per cent.

Intellectualization of Indigenous Languages of South Africa: Translation Twists and Turns

This paper provides an overview of the intellectualization of the indigenous languages of South Africa through a translation of academic texts and using isiZulu by way of example. The intellectualization of a language means the advancement, upliftment, and enrichment of a language, enabling it for use in different domains as a language of research, science and technology, and teaching and learning. The point of departure for this paper is the value of translation as an enabler for the intellectualization of languages. Using Nord’s functionalist theory, this paper seeks to provide an overview of the process of translation of doctoral abstracts from English into isiZulu as a contribution towards the intellectualization of isiZulu at the University of KwaZulu-Natal (UKZN), South Africa. The aim of this qualitative study, therefore, was to explore the intricacies involved in the journey to the intellectualization of languages that belong to different language families, specifically English and isiZulu. The data used were 12 doctoral dissertation abstracts randomly selected from a pool of abstracts from various disciplines submitted for translation from English into isiZulu at UKZN as part of the initiative of intellectualizing isiZulu. The study established an acknowledgment of the intricacies involved in the translation of academic texts and suggests possible practices to be followed to contribute successfully to the intellectualization of indigenous languages of South Africa, isiZulu in particular.

Optical Character Recognition and text cleaning in the indigenous South African languages

This article represents follow-up work on unpublished presentations by the authors of text and corpus cleaning strategies for the African languages. In this article we provide a comparative description of cleaning of web-sourced and text-sourced material to be used for the compilation of corpora with specific attention to cleaning of text-based material, since this is particularly relevant for the indigenous South African languages. For the purposes of this study, we use the term “web-sourced material” to refer to digital data sourced from the internet, whereas “text-based material” refers to hard copy textual material. We identify the different types of errors found in such texts, looking specifically at typical scanning errors in these languages, followed by an evaluation of three commercially available Optical Character Recognition (OCR) tools. We argue that the cleanness of texts is a matter of granularity, depending on the envisaged application of the corpus comprised by the texts. Text corpora which are to be utilized for e.g. lexicographic purposes can tolerate a higher level of ‘noise’ than those used for the compilation of e.g. spelling and grammar checkers. We conclude with some suggestions for text cleaning for the indigenous languages of South Africa.

Exploring explicitation and amplification in translated literary texts from English into isiZulu

This article focuses on two translation techniques, namely explicitation and amplification. Substantial research has been conducted using these translation techniques in languages other than indigenous languages of South Africa. These two techniques were explored in a translation from English into isiZulu, using Brenda Munitich’s The Fisherman, which is translated into isiZulu as ‘Umdobi’. Besides giving a clear understanding of the two translation techniques (explicitation and amplification), the article shows how these techniques can facilitate the translation of texts from English into isiZulu. Further, it shows how translators can use these techniques to improve the quality of their translations, especially expressive texts.

Distinguishing between ontology and ‘decolonisation as praxis’

In this review article I closely read the recently published book African Philosophical and Literary Possibilities: Re-reading the Canon (2020), edited by Aretha Phiri. I suggest two ways of reading the text. The first levels a critique at some of the conflations we find in the text and the second showcases the useful takeaways that the reader gleans from the book. These takeaways are not—themselves—without criticisms, however. Such criticism is generative in that it shores up the work that still remains to be addressed by those working in the decolonial tradition, both here at home (i.e., in the South Africa academe) and further afield. In sum, I demonstrate that the objectives of decolonisation are clearly discernible when we apply ourselves to scholarship developed in the Indigenous languages of South Africa.

Using MonoConc Pro to teach and learn lexical collocations in Xitsonga

Few language resources have been developed for indigenous languages in South Africa. Surprisingly, these are also official languages which constitutionally share the same language status as other languages. One of the major challenges for the development of basic language resources is the lack of digital corpora that can be used to train and develop the resources. Such a challenge has impeded the use of technology for research, learning, and teaching domains in indigenous languages. In this study, we used MonoConc Pro, a concordancer, to demonstrate how language users can utilise the software to display lexical collocation from a corpus for teaching and learning purposes. We illustrated how corpus can be used simultaneously with language technology to teach and learn aspects of linguistics in a form of lexical collocations in Xitsonga. An Autshumato Xitsonga Monolingual Corpus (AXMC) that was retrieved from the South African Centre for Digital Language Resources repository was used as data for analysis. The AXMC is a corpus that was collected and semi-automatically aligned at the sentence level during the Autshumato project. To search for lexical collocations, we interrogated the AXMC corpus using the MonoConc Pro program. A semi-automatic search for collocates of Xitsonga adjectives lavakulu, letikulu, lavantsongo, and letinene was conducted. The study found that lexical collocations or words that co-occur with adjectives are nouns, adjectives, possessives, and relatives. It was also observed that each adjective frequently collocates with certain nouns belonging to a specific class. The results obtained suggest a practical way in which language technologies can be used to explore corpora and examine language patterns for teaching and learning. We hope that this line of study will lead to the use of modern language resources to examine linguistic traits in indigenous languages.

Foundation Phase teachers’ experiences with instruction in the mother tongue in the Eastern Cape

Background: The perception that educating learners using their mother tongue contributes positively to educational and learning outcomes is well documented. Aim: This study explores the purported benefits of employing the mother tongue in teaching Foundation Phase (FP) learners. Specifically, the study focuses on an examination of the experiences of teachers of isiXhosa (one of the indigenous languages in South Africa) and explains the effects of employing isiXhosa in teaching at the FP (Grades 1–3). Setting: The study was conducted in three rural schools in the Eastern Cape. Methods: The study utilised a qualitative approach and case study design was followed. The sample comprised nine FP teachers (one male and eight females) who were selected purposively from three public schools. Three FP teachers were selected from each school and the one-on-one interview was used to collect data. The collected data were analysed thematically. Results: This study revealed that a majority of FP teachers had not received training to teach subjects using isiXhosa as a medium of instruction. This study also revealed that teachers encountered numerous difficulties in teaching mathematics and life skills using isiXhosa as a medium because of lack of vocabulary to match mathematics and life skills concepts. Conclusion: The authors suggest that teacher training institutions should provide adequate and relevant professional training to FP teachers so that they could teach in isiXhosa optimally. The authors also suggest that all textbooks, readers, educational media, study guides and related literature be made available in isiXhosa.

Language contact and linguistic change: The case of Afrikaans and English influence on isiNdebele

Adoption is an unavoidable type of linguistic behaviour that occurs when two or more languages are in a state of contact with each other. Adoption is the introduction of single words or short frozen phrases from one variety (i.e. language) into the other. Adoption goes together with adaptation. There are different levels of adaptation, but this article focuses on adoptives which are fully indigenised. As such they are incorporated into the grammatical system of the borrowing language, treated as part of its lexicon, assume its phonological and morphological characteristics and enter into its syntactic structures. Numerous studies in African languages have illustrated that lesser developed languages have benefitted from the adoption of items from other languages. IsiNdebele, as one of the lesser developed indigenous languages of South Africa, has been in close contact with Afrikaans and English for many years and has adopted and adapted items from a number of word categories, such as nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, relatives and conjunctions. This article investigates and discusses the adoption and adaptation of Afrikaans and English words by isiNdebele. The discussion focuses mainly on the various word categories in Afrikaans and English that isiNdebele has adopted items from, lexicalisation of Afrikaans phrases and the syntactic influence of Afrikaans on isiNdebele.

Community support - the missing link in indigenous language promotion in South Africa?

Literature on the challenges facing indigenous languages in South Africa often highlights the proverbial policy-practice gap among many other constraints. Drawing on lessons from language policy implementation programmes in other countries, this article offers a critical examination of how the policy-practice gap is potentially driven by a glaring lack of cultivating community support. Although community support has been proven to be crucial in implementing language policies around the world, in South Africa the language policy is designed and implemented from a largely top-down approach. The article provides a brief analysis of the activities of selected non-state actors who promote indigenous languages in the country. It concludes by proposing that greater attention be paid to community support as a necessary and critical step towards ensuring more positive outcomes in promoting indigenous languages in South Africa.

Information access in indigenous languages : a case study in Zulu

This study focuses on the intellectual accessibility of information in indigenous languages, using Zulu, one of the main indigenous languages in South Africa, as a test case. Both Cross-Lingual Information Retrieval (CLIR) and metadata are discussed as possible means of facilitating access and a bilateral approach combining these two methods is proposed. Popular CLIR approaches and their resource requirements are analysed and the dictionary-based approach combined with approximate string-matching for query translation from Zulu to English are discussed in detail. Metadata formats for knowledge representation from the Indigenous Knowledge (IK) viewpoint are discussed, in particular the advantages and limitations of the Dublin Core (DC) metadata format.

The initiator in the translation process: A case study of The Prophet by Kahlil Gibran in the indigenous languages of South Africa

This article examines the role played by the initiator in the translation of The Prophet by Kahlil Gibran into the indigenous South African languages, and the resulting influence on the translator's decisions. This is achieved through an exploration of how this work came to be translated into the indigenous languages of South Africa, with a discussion of who initiated the translation process, and the intention behind the decision. Translation scholars generally agree that the translator is seldom given an explicit brief; it then becomes his or her responsibility to ask for one. In considering the function of the initiator in the translation of this work by Gibran, the aim was to establish whether the brief provided by the initiator was useful. The article seeks to establish some guidelines as to what constitutes a clear translation brief, in the case of literary translation in particular.

Revitalising and preserving endangered indigenous languages in South Africa through writing and publishing

Libraries and librarians play a central role in organising and communicating knowledge. They are an important part of the knowledge production and use chain. The development and sustenance of a knowledge-based economy hinges on their ability to facilitate the accessibility, retrievability and usability of the knowledge and information that permeates the information society. Writers and publishers as part and parcel of the knowledge chain are central to the production and distribution of ideas. Language is fundamental to their ability to communicate and get their literal messages, expressions and ideas through. Their preferred language of writing and publishing may mean a difference between the growth and demise of a language of a society and its culture and civilisation. Many indigenous languages around the globe are struggling to survive because of various reasons including neglect by writers and publishers. Publishers and writers as major role players in the knowledge production and reproduction chain may assist in promoting and preserving indigenous languages in general and in South Africa in particular. This may ensure that South Africa's knowledge economy develops without sidelining or discriminating against any culture or language. There are challenges and opportunities that writers and publishers are likely to face in attempting to revitalise and empower indigenous languages in South Africa, but they are not insurmountable. Using a theoretical approach, the purpose of this article is to highlight the role that writers and publishers may play in revitalising and preserving endangered indigenous languages in South Africa. Recommendations are made on how the role players may deal with the challenges that have culminated in the neglect of the endangered indigenous languages.

African languages, linguistics, child speech and speech pathology – the connection

This article deals with the need for the incorporation of the study of child language in the field of African Linguistics. It gives an overview of some of the studies conducted in the area of acquisition of Xhosa with a view to developing norms for the development of Xhosa amongst monolingual Xhosa-speaking children. This is useful in the diagnosis of speech and language disorders using criterion referenced measures. The developmental data may be used in the development of culturally appropriate standardised assessment measures: which are severely lacking for the indigenous languages of South Africa.

Mother-tongue education or bilingual education for South Africa: theories, pedagogies and sustainability

Language rights, language development and the need for a multilingual literate population in South Africa have been issues debated not only in public, but also among academics and other stakeholders in education in South Africa. There remains a need for a population proficient at least in some indigenous languages, but also able to access languages that facilitate communication beyond the confines of the nation or region. In the recent past schools and universities have responded to national imperatives to develop this capacity. They have employed a range of policy and other types of incentives aimed at increasing access to the indigenous languages of South Africa and improving the quality of education received in those languages, where sufficiently large communities exist to support mother-tongue communication and use. This article provides a different account from those already mentioned, drawing instead on theoretical developments in linguistics to illustrate a number of points concerning the relationship between theory, approaches and contexts in language development in South Africa. The article addresses the educational imperatives in relation to theoretical, socio-geographic, and socio-economic contingencies that affect their sustainability.Journal for Language Teaching vol Vol. 41 (2) 2007: pp.1-16

Beyond 2000: Sharpening the focus on the indigenous languages

This article is intended to stimulate intense discussions on the issue of the indigenous languages in South Africa. The Constitution of the Republic of South Africa stipulates that the South African indigenous languages are historically disadvantaged, and therefore extra effort should be applied to elevate their status and to advance their usage. The Bill of Rights stipulates that everyone has a right to use the language of his/her choice. This, therefore, means that the development of the indigenous languages is fully backed by our country's constitution. The Pan South African Language Board has given us correct guidelines towards developing our indigenous languages. In developing our indigenous languages we should observe language ownership, language diffusion and language empowerment.