Local Languages Demand More Space on the Internet (fwd)

[phil cash cash]

Local Languages Demand More Space on the Internet

African Woman and Child Feature Service  (Nairobi) NEWS
February 17, 2005
Posted to the web February 16, 2005
http://allafrica.com/stories/200502160942.html

By Arthur Okwemba
Nairobi

A bid to have African languages join the likes of English and French in
the Internet is being blocked by information experts from the West as
lacking in commercial value.

A group of African linguistics and technology experts at a recent
African Regional Preparatory Conference for the World Summit on
Information Society (WSIS) in Accra, Ghana, say they have already
developed special characters that can now help these languages be used
on the World Wide Web.

They argue that the use of languages such as English has played a big
role in the development of Western countries.

Another reason the Westerners are opposed to African languages being put
on the Web, they say is their structure with some having characters and
sounds in their alphabet that are not recognisable in the coding system
of the Internet.

Therefore, the continent should continue expressing itself through
appropriate languages in social and economic development.

According a Prof Mwasoko from the University of Dar-es-Salaam, Africa's
political elites are a problem than a solution, as they too oppose, for
reason well known to them, the use of these languages on the Internet,

Prof Salam Diakite, Director of Research and Documentation, African
Academy of Languages said the only way to make African languages
accepted in the cyberspace is to transact business in those languages.

In Kenya, for instance, information on tourism and tea products should
be in a local language or in Kiswahili, which Microsoft is going to
launch officially on the Internet between April and May this year.

Other communities like the Maasai Kikuyu, Luhya, Luo, or Turkana can
also use their languages on the Internet when communicating with their
family members, relatives or transacting business with the outside
world.

If this happens, then those from Europe and America will have no
otherwise but to learn how to use these languages. But this can only
occur if special characters and sounds like those found in the Gikuyu
dialects are accepted by Unicode consortium.

Based in the USA, and with organizations such as Microsoft and
International Business Machines (IBM) as members, Unicode Standard
defines how characters and sounds of different languages are
represented in modern software products and standards.

Language experts think bantu speaking communities will be better placed
to put their languages on the Internet because they can adopt the
Kiswahili characters and sounds, which Unicode has approved.

Addressing participants at the Accra conference, Mark Lange, senior
attorney at Microsoft, said they support the idea of African languages
on the internet.

But he was fast to add that African countries need to put in place
proper standards for the idea to be supported by other stakeholders in
the information society.

Currently, there are plans to put in place an African standardization
and certification centre for those who want to use their vernacular
languages on the website.

Dr Shem Ochuodho, a computer expert, says any attempt to address over 80
per cent of Africans who live in the rural areas on how to achieve the
Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), can, among other things, be
achieved by using their languages online.

"The only problem is the existence of a few words from certain African
languages whose sounds cannot be accepted by the computer," says Prof
Diakite.

African linguistics at the African Academy of Languages have therefore
developed special characters for these languages, and now want them
accepted by Unicode.

This list of African characters is then to be officially submitted to
the committee of ISO standardization so that the characters can be
added to their list as pre-composed African characters.

Once this happens, letters in the African language in use will have to
be mapped into the keyboards of computers. The type of fonts used will
also have to change depending on the language being used.

In addition, a dictionary of the African languages has to be developed
to aid those people who are going to have problems in expressing
themselves in these languages.

So far, less than one percent of African languages have developed these
requirements and gotten access to the cyberspace. In Ethiopia, where
the local and national language, Amharic, is in use, attempts have been
made to use it on the computer.

Experts there have been struggling since the 1980's to make the computer
recognize the Amharic characters. Since they have been accepted by
Unicode, Dr Atnafu says they have in place a Content Management System,
which allows them to use both Amharic and English on the computer.

In South Africa too, local languages have been put in use on the
Internet.

Whereas these two countries have made headway in placing their local
languages on websites, other African countries face a double challenge.

Most of them have to find ways of ensuring their people speak and use
their own language when communicating economic, social and political
issues.

As a first step, the conference has recommended that each African
country should introduce the teaching of an African language from the
primary school level up to the university as a linguistic bilingual
policy.

This language is to be taught alongside English or French and both are
to be examinable subjects at both primary and secondary school levels
as well as in colleges.

African Union is expected to take up the issue, and impress upon member
states to implement the recommendation. Likewise, to accelerate the use
of local languages in ICTs, the Union is to declare 2006 as the year of
African languages.

As the momentum to use Kenyan and other African languages on the website
picks up, linguistics are now warning parents who pride in their
children's fluent foreing languages to start a rethink.

They argue that children instructed in their mother tongue are more
likely to grasp what they are taught than when the instructiona are in
English or French.