[A12n-forum] "The first steps of African Languages on the Internet"

["Don Osborn" <dzo@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

FYI, an article in the iConnect Africa newsletter (July 2003)
http://www.uneca.org/aisi/IConnectAfrica/v1n5.htm (thanks to John Daly for
bringing this to our attention on Afrik-IT).  DZO


"THE QUARTERLY STORY: The first steps of African Languages on the Internet"

By Etienne Tassé (AISI 2003 IICD Local Content Media Award winner)

"Despite four decades since independence in Africa, the place given to
African languages have not been developed for scientific, technical and
technological knowledge", according to Adama Samassekou, President of the
Bamako-based Académie africaine des langues (ACALAN), and current
Chairperson of the World Summit on the Information Society. How can this
problem be tackled? During the African Regional Preparatory Conference, held
in Bamako in May 2002, Samassekou chaired a meeting of linguists and
information experts to develop a strategy to for African language content
for the Internet.

According to Canadian Laurent Bourbeau from the organisation Progiciel BPI,
in Montréal, "if African cultural identity is to be expressed via the
Internet, everything should be done so that African languages have a
presence". Bourbeau, a language software developer explained that the use of
African languages in informatics has been made easier thanks to the
international standard UCS/JUC (Universal Character Set), implemented since
the beginning of 2000.

This standard allows the computerized processing of many African languages:
mainly those that do not have sound characters. However, it is difficult for
some languages such as Lingala (spoken in DRC) or the Ewondo (spoken in
Cameroon), where the sound characters need the use of two or three signs
instead of one. "In the UCS/JUC standard, the French language, for example
has solved the problem between the sounds of e, which is different from é by
creating compound characters, such as the accented vowels and the cedilla 'ç
'. African countries should insist on similar solutions for their languages
and demand this of International Standard Committees", insists Laurent
Bourbeau.

There are a number of initiatives being undertaken on African languages.
Progiciel BPI has produced a CD-Rom software containing 20 African
languages, such as Bambara, Ewondo, Fulfuldé, Swahili, and Wolof for
example, which can be used on Linux systems as well as Windows. available
for any African user. The International Linguist Society (La Société
internationale de linguistique - SIL) has developed software on local
languages that is also freely available. Based on this effort many other
researchers have developed character sets that can transcribe African
language alphabets.

Furthermore, the experts who met in Bamako advocated among other things for
the creation of two funds: The first is the "African Multilingual
Information Highway" fund (Autoroute de l'information multilingue
africaine - Aima) to support the development and maintenance of web sites on
African languages. The other fund is to support training of information
experts to develop content in local African languages.