[lg policy] South Africa: Varsity gears up for Zulu

[Harold Schiffman]

Varsity gears up for Zulu
MATTHEW SAVIDES | 10 November, 2016 07:20
University lecture room. File photo.
*Image by:* Gallo Images/iStockphoto
Students at the University of KwaZulu-Natal could soon be learning Zulu.
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The university will, later today, launch a Zulu spell-checker, a "term
bank" of technical words and phrases, a Zulu lexicon mobile app and one of
the biggest indigenous language corpuses in the world.

"UKZN has a language policy that seeks to improve the two official
languages [of the university] so that they can effectively be used in
teaching, in learning and in research," said university language planning
and development office director Dr Langa Khumalo.

The languages are English and Zulu, "but isiZulu is not as well developed
as English," he said.

"There is this language policy that seeks to intellectualise isiZulu so
that it can be used for higher function domains; so that it can be used in
research, in teaching scientific materials and in disciplines such as
anatomy, architecture, mathematics, and so on."

While many South African universities grapple with the use of Afrikaans as
a medium of instruction, and while a call for the "decolonisation" of
higher education in South Africa and the inclusion of indigenous languages
has been made during ongoing protests.

Khumalo said UKZN's approach to languages has gone a long way towards
shielding the university from these controversies.

However, Khumalo said that, until the Zulu language was beefed up with
technical terms and phrases, it would not truly be an effective medium of
instruction.

At a cost of R5-million and developed over more than three years, the
university has come up with terminology in scientific disciplines with less
complex terms.

One of the key developments was the creation of the isiZulu National
Corpus, a collection of "potentially all the documents that are written in
isiZulu". With more than 20 million words, it is one of the biggest
collections of African language words in the world and will be available
free online.

Another is the isiZulu Term Bank, a collection of discipline-specific words
and phrases that can be used by students. The first complete term bank is
for architecture.

These two projects also spawned the first ever Zulu Language spell-checker
as well as a ZuluLex mobile app, an Android or IOS-compatible app that
allows students to access the terminology lists at the touch of a screen.

English would remain the language of instruction at UKZN, Khumalo said, but
ongoing development of Zulu could see this change in the future.

http://www.timeslive.co.za/thetimes/2016/11/10/Varsity-gears-up-for-Zulu


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