The following article from the African Woman and Child Feature Service, seen at http://allafrica.com/stories/200502160942.html (and also on DigAfrica), may be of interest.
There is one inaccuracy in the report - the special characters (or extended Latin characters) mentioned have for the most part been identified and used for some time (many are IPA letters; for their use in Africa see for instance documents from 1930, 1966, 1978 at http://www.bisharat.net/Documents/ ). The Unicode encoding issue is of course more recent and the African Academy of Languages (ACALAN) is addressing certain aspects of that. Don Osborn Bisharat.net "Local Languages Demand More Space on the Internet" African Woman and Child Feature Service (Nairobi) http://www.awcfs.org February 17, 2005 Posted to the web February 16, 2005 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. -- ------------------------ Yahoo! Groups Sponsor --------------------~--> What would our lives be like without music, dance, and theater? Donate or volunteer in the arts today at Network for Good! http://us.click.yahoo.com/pkgkPB/SOnJAA/Zx0JAA/TpIolB/TM --------------------------------------------------------------------~-> Yahoo! Groups Links <*> To visit your group on the web, go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/AfricanLanguages/ <*> To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] <*> Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to: http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
