Where there is no spellchecker

For a text in a language like Fula that has no spell checker support, here's a workaround that might be more effective than resort to ever more careful copyediting: Break the text down into words and then sort the list into alphabetical order. Better yet, do a word frequency table.

The idea is to align words in a way that facilitates visual checking in a different way. It's especially effective for recurrent words and related words that in the generated list would fall together, but among which misspelled words would be counted separately.

I recently tried this with a text in Fulfulde of Niger and found numerous instances of what appear to be single to double letter errors (doubled consonants and vowels are significant for pronunciation, often with meaning differences where the letter is single), and substitution of plain b, d, or y for ɓ, ɗ, or ƴ(and vice-versa) along with other minor but not unimportant errors. The next step would be to go back to the original text to search the erroneous forms and replace with the correct spelling (either manually or by the search-and-replace function). Not so elegant perhaps, but should be effective.

There are a couple of ways of generating the word list, with the simplest being to substitute hard returns for spaces in the word processor program, then clean out punctuation and quotation marks, and then sort. This can be converted into a frequency list by means of a pivot table in Excel (and perhaps other spread sheet programs.

Another way is to use a text analysis utility software. I used one online at Online-Utility.org.

Ultimately if one is doing a lot of work with text in a particular language, one imagines that lists generated in this way might be useful in building a corpus which could in turn be used for development of a spell-checker.

The way I came about this approach was in incorporating word frequencies as a step in qualitative data analysis (QDA) of text ("where there is no computer-assisted QDA software"). Word and phrase frequencies are of course used in a different way in the latter, but it occurred that breaking down text in this way might also be an aid in comparing the forms of the words themselves (spelling, mainly).

(For those not familiar with the famous basic health and first-aid publication for poor regions of the global South - Where There Is No Doctor - the title of this post is inspired in a very small way by it.)

Touchscreen keyboards for African languages?

Who's doing what with touchscreen (virtual) keyboards for African languages? Although not a big fan of them for my personal use, I've long recognized that in principle they offer the potential to bypass the obvious limitations of physical computer keyboards - with their fixed number of keys - for layouts supporting various extended Latin character sets. This is important for a number of major languages of West and Central Africa whose orthographies include extended characters.

It was a friend's recent mention of someone else's mention of developing a Hausa keyboard for Nuance Swype that has me trying to get up to speed on where virtual keyboards for touchscreens are now, with particular reference to African languages.

If your keyboard is basically an interactive picture, then it would seem to offer the potential to modify and modestly expand to accommodate different alphabets such that of Hausa (adding rather than substituting keys would be easier on a larger screen of course - tablet rather than smartphone). Has this been done for African languages (other than Arabic, which benefits in terms of computer support from its wide international usage)?

Putting the question regarding Hausa - with additional reference to Apple touchscreen keyboards - to the old Hausa charsets & keyboards forum got helpful replies from Tom Gewecke (whose Multilingual Mac blog is an excellent source of info on iOS as well as Mac for diverse languages). Seems that iPhone and iPad support for a language like Hausa that is written with extended Latin (leaving aside the question of Ajami for another post) requires apps, and then cutting and pasting to use what one produces with them into whatever one is working on (email, document).

But there's lot's more going on with touchscreen keyboards. Looking for more information on Swype (which claims support for 70+ languages), I'm coming across mention of a number of other touchscreen keyboards and character selection apps. This is a question I plan to come back to but would appreciate any information from others.

More on standard orthographies of African languages

In the previous post, I alluded to a discussion on H-Africa in December 2007 under the title "Names for African peoples & languages." Since it seems broadly relevant to issues raised in that post, I'll re-up a longish excerpt from one message in that discussion,* with some minor edits (in italics) and added outlinks.

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With regard to the issue of orthographies, I think it is an oversimplification, and indeed in many cases an error to say that no one is using the "official" orthographies for African languages. Certainly for Pulaar in Senegal, there is some significant use of the orthography (e.g., publications by ARED [Associates in Research and Education for Development], many of which come from Fulaphone Senegalese). Adult literacy classes, and now increasingly some new first-language/bilingual primary education programs use the official orthography.

It is true that governments have not placed much emphasis on first-language literacy, and often none at all in formal schooling. In addition, language policies, including standards of orthography, are not given much official support.

So it is also true that people who go through English-only or French-only schooling may not be comfortable with an orthography that they were never taught (to quote just one person on this subject - Philip Emeagwali in a speech he made in 2004: "I was taught to write in a new language. As a result, I became literate in English but remain illiterate in Igbo - my native tongue."). This is an issue of language and education policies.

Nevertheless, where there are standards, efforts have been made to develop them, and there are people who do use them. To ignore these standards, especially now as they are getting to the point of being able to implement them more extensively in information technology, would be a disservice.

I was recently in South Africa for a workshop on localizing software and content in African languages. Two of the participants were Senegalese and had been working separately on translating different software into Wolof. This work - no less than writing a book - depends on a common orthography, which happily exists. One of the projects, ANAFA, has also been working on computer literacy in Wolof - another area relying on standard orthography. (BTW, they are coordinating their efforts now; I should also mention in passing that the Wolof Wikipedia is beginning to get more attention too.)

This may seem far from deciding what orthography to use in citing a word from a language in a scholarly paper, but I'd argue that all this highlights a context that is indeed relevant to such a choice. In any case, in the end it seems like a question of principle. The level of attention scholars pay to such issues seems to me not to be neutral - it sends a message of support or of dismissal; it respects the standard such as it is, or it says the standard is not worth the bother.

I'm painting this in somewhat simple terms. I do recognize that there are various issues surrounding the various orthographies (part of the rationale for N'Ko for Manding languages is the assertion that the Latin script is not adapted to the language). But ultimately any writing system that is reasonably well conceived and consistently used is of more value than either pursuit of an unattainable perfection (some orthographies such as for Bambara have been revised several times to improve them) or a return to the old days when African languages were written according to whatever transcription matched the author's experience or imagination.

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* Source: "Names for African peoples & language: REPLY," Don Osborn, H-Africa list, 14 December 2007.

Texting in Wolof & implicatons for standard orthographies

In a recent post on Think Africa Press entitled "Wolof 2.0: Spoken Languages in a Digital Age," Juliana Friend offers a very interesting snapshot (and video) of the meeting of the Wolof language in Senegal with information and communications technology.

A remark by a Senegalese woman quoted in the post about spelling in Wolof not mattering as much as getting the message across oddly had me remembering a long discussion on H-Africa in December 2007 ("Names for African peoples & languages") wherein one of the topics was whether scholars should use the official orthographies of languages whose terms they used in publication.

Standardized spellings and orthographies of course have a reason, or really several functions (from clarity of meaning to facilitating learning to read). They are more critical in long texts and formalized uses, such as a localized interface on computer or mobile device, than they are in texting or citing an occasional word in an academic publication. So one sees for example attention to Wolof spelling and orthographies in both the content and the interface of the Wolof Wikipedia.

Ms. Friend's post focuses on Senegal - the main country where Wolof is spoken - but it's important to remember that the language is also spoken by significant segments of the populations of Gambia and southern Mauritania. The issue of transnational harmonization of the written forms of the many cross-border languages of Africa is a subject that has been given official attention since the 1960s. It would be interesting to know whether written Wolof is still "unified" in this sense across the countries where it is spoken. (I'll come back to this general subject in a later post.)

It's also probably worth thinking about how it came about that in Senegal "French was traditionally the language of writing, Wolof the language of speaking." In fact, Wolof was historically written in Wolofal, an Arabic-based script whose use has persisted.

Part of the reason that a language like Wolof is spoken "not" written has to do in large measure with education policies under which generations of students were not taught to read anything but French (or in Gambia, English). In Saint-Louis, Senegal, an early effort to teach in Wolof was stopped in 1829, setting the tone of French monolingual education policy in colonies acquired later.

The latter historic anecdote came from an article several years ago on spell checkers for certain African languages. In the case of Wolof, maybe a new generation of spell checker apps for devices on which one texts might be an important piece of the establishment of its official written form. Other pieces might range from first-language literacy apps for smart mobile devices to evolution of education policies.

More notes about all the lists in the sidebar

This blog was originally set up with a side purpose of providing links to various fora (forums) on which African languages and technology were discussed - and these still appear in the sidebar. For some years, some of these fora - email lists and discussion boards - were quite active and had practical impact beyond the important role of facilitating information sharing among diverse people involved in internationalization and localization for (or at least directly relevant to) African languages. They were significant enough, I thought, to be listed under "Facilitating communication about localization" in African Languages in a Digital Age.

The ALDA book was not, however, the place to get into the history of these efforts. A little over 6 years ago, I gave some background about the lists that had been set up under Bisharat and the PanAfrican Localisation (PAL) project (predecessor to ANLoc) in a posting entitled "Some notes about all the lists in the sidebar."

Nor was ALDA the place to discuss specific plans with regard to those lists or more recent forms of social media. I'll take a quick stab at that now, along with other info per "More notes ...."

The "A12n" (Africanization of ICT) lists basically went offline beginning with closing A12-forum and A12n-entraide at the end of 2007, and then A12n-collaboration closing in mid-2009 when Kabissa could no longer host it. The smaller A12n-policy persisted a short while longer. All the traffic on these lists from the end of November 2004 is archived on A12n Archives. However, that leaves out early traffic on three lists, notably the very active first two-and-a-half years of A12n-collab. I am working on recuperating that to post as a file on A12n-archives.

The PAL lists are similarly preserved on PAL-archives.

The QuickTopic boards still exist for reference, but due to issues with spam, most have been closed to new posts. The exceptions are the three boards for the Nigerian "decamillionare" languages - Hausa, Igbo, and Yoruba - which are still open. Last August, in the wake of Google Translate's most recent African language machine translation project, which includes these three languages along with Somali and Zulu, I posted on the three related QT boards to see what might ensue. Present thinking is that it's not clear there is a benefit in trying to sustain these as active fora.

There is a similar set of issues for other lists that I have started or co-founded... Like Multilingual_Literacy, which addresses a topic that still seems to me to be under-appreciated (approaches to literacy in school and out, in societies where people speak more than one language). AfrophoneWikis addresses a set of issues that is still very current, but the list is not so active.

So, I will be doing more cleaning of the sidebar soon.

One is left with the conclusion that email lists and discussion boards may have utility depending on the topic and user community, but that they require time and some strong effort to maintain as active communities. Their heyday seems to have passed, just judging (subjectively) by the generally lower traffic on many lists. But at the same time it's not clear that other social media - the Facebook group on African Languages for example - whatever their other advantages, can fill the same role for something like collaboration on localization.

An additional note. A few months ago, I added Google adsense to see what that might yield. It's an experiment, but one that hopefully does not detract too much from the overall presentation. So far it seems to be a waste of space.

Looking back and looking forward

For those who have read this blog before, it would come as no surprise that there has been a hiatus in posting followed by another post like this, breaking the silence. So with this I'd like to catch up and look ahead.

I last posted over three years ago, just before the International Mother Language Day 2010 - something I've paid attention to over the years. IMLD is also the occasion on which the winner of the Linguapax Award is given in recognition of "actions carried out in different areas in favour of the preservation of linguistic diversity, revitalization and reactivation of linguistic communities and the promotion of multilingualism." In 2013, Africa had another awardee, the Mauritian organization Ledikasyon pu Travayer (education for workers in Morisyen, the French-based Indian Ocean islands creole language of Mauritius).

However, last year, the first two (very distinguished) African recipients of the Linguapax Prize passed away - Neville Alexander of South Africa (Linguapax Award 2008) in July 2012, and Maurice Tadadjeu of Cameroon (Linguapax Award 2005) a few months later in December.

When I last posted on this blog in early 2010, Niger was in a muddle, politically speaking, and Mali was apparently a model; now Niger seems stable and Mali is recovering from a terrible year. I do not plan to spend too much time in this blog on issues relating to governments and conflict, though in some cases such issues will be hard to ignore. However the focus will continue to be on African languages and the "information society," along with related aspects of development and education.

2010

During most of the rest of 2010 I was based in Djibouti, and had the opportunity to follow up on and observe some US military civil affairs projects in northern Uganda and eastern Ethiopia. From the point of view of African languages, what was particularly interesting was to note aspects of training of community animal health workers in Oromo language (''Oromiffa'') in the Harari region of Ethiopia, and in Karamojong (''ŋaKaramojoŋ'') in Moroto, Uganda (my third trip to that country). While English was also used in both cases, the first languages of the trainees (Oromo and Karamojong) were central to learning. (I compiled a list of veterinary and animal terms in Karamojong, cross-checked with several references.)

2011

From late 2010 was back in the US with family again, and focused on different work and home priorities. In 2011 there were two conferences of note that had particular importance for applied work with African languages:

• Conference on Human Language Technology for Development (HLTD 2011), Alexandria, Egypt, 2-5 May 2011. This was organized by PAN Localisation and ANLoc, with support from IDRC and was hosted by the Bibliotheca Alexandrina. In a sense, this consideration of human language technologies (HLTs; understood to include a range of applications for manipulating and transforming languages) for development is the logical extension of efforts to localize software and internet content. It will be a key area to follow in coming years.
• Action for Global Information Sharing 2011 (AGIS11), Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, 1-2 December 2011. This was co-sponsored by the Localisation Research Centre and UNECA, along with others. Although technically not the first time for meeting of African language localizers with members of the localization industry, as a smaller scale meeting happened at the 2005 LISA Cairo conference almost exactly 6 years earlier), this was evidently much more significant in scale.

2012

One noted with great interest the efforts of Translators Without Borders (TWB) in early 2012, which included a translation center in Kenya.

In July, I personally had the opportunity to participate in Wikimania 2012 in Washington, DC, including the Tech@State event on "Wiki.gov." On the Wikimania proper side of things, there was a renewal of discussion concerning African language Wikipedias, including some discussion of potential links with a medical translations project (which not surprisingly has connections with TWB).

2013

In 2013 I've been working in Asia for the first time in half a decade, this time in Afghanistan, coordinating survey research. This has obvious multilingual dimensions here, many of which are relevant to multilingual societies elsewhere in Asia and Africa. An aspect I've been particularly interested in exploring is "cross-language qualitative data analysis," which surprisingly (or maybe not so surprisingly, given how language is often a secondary consideration in other areas of endeavor, even when an obvious factor) has only relatively recently gotten serious attention.

Although I have limited time for it, have begun working again with the material from the Fulfulde Lexicon (1993). This entailed converting old files in WordPerfect 5.1 format (not as hard as it might seem, but not straightforward). A major part of the object is to prepare to integrate the material in Kamusi's online platform.

So with that brief retrospective, I'd like to resume but with a slightly different approach here on out - ideally shorter and more frequent posts, pivoting off of items of interest from diverse sources ...

Niger's coup: Do two wrongs make a right?

Although this blog has a title related to Niger, it is not concerned primarily with that country, nor is the area of politics and governance its focus (except when policies relating to localization, language, or education may be concerned).

Nevertheless, the diverse reactions to the recent coup in Niger raised in my mind the same question as that of the IRIN News article linked in the title. The African Union and ECOWAS have been consistent in condemning the measures taken last year by President Mamadou Tandja to modify the constitution to prolong his rule. Yet they have also condemned the coup on principle - they could hardly do otherwise. The evident expressions of support for the coup in Niamey therefore exposes an odd juxtaposition.

There are two other perspectives: One that the coup was not a surprise, and the other that Pres. Tandja seemed to have sacrificed his potential longer-term stature as an elder statesman in his country and the region in the quest for a longer period in power - and now he has apparently lost that too.

Beyond whatever lessons one might draw, or what one may think about the coup, the main issues now are how the new junta will handle the transition back to democracy and rule of law, and how ECOWAS, the African Union, and other international partners can support and facilitate that transition.

Languages in Uganda

A few quick observations on languages in Uganda, during a second trip to Uganda.

During my first trip here last November, I had the chance to note some written Luganda (apparently) on signs in Kampala, and Acholi on signs in Acholiland (although most signage throughout was in English). This time I have noted the option of Luganda on ATM machines in Kampala and several language options on cellphones.

In previous research on language and localization in Uganda, I learned about the Acholi/Luo newspaper Rupiny, the main(?) office of which is in Gulu where I am now. (It is part of the New Vision group which also includes papers in other Ugandan languages).

Passing of Denis Bilodeau

I just learned that Denis Bilodeau, a long-time senior project officer and division chief of USAID, passed away earlier this month in Bamako. He had a long career in West Africa was well known in the region for his work on information and communications technology for development (ICT4D) projects.

Although I only met him during my last trip to Bamako in May 2008, I had communicated with him on a couple of occasions prior to that. I first heard about him and his work from a colleague in ICRISAT in Mali (where I worked briefly in 1999 and 2000), who spoke highly of his work and described him as "plus malien que les maliens."

The occasion of meeting him was the chance for Dwayne Bailey (head of the ANLoc project) and me to talk about aspects of localization and how that could advance work in ICT4D. Sadly we never had the chance to collaborate on any of that, but hopefully there will be opportunities to build on the foundations that Denis helped build.

ANLoc workshop, Ain Sokhna, Egypt

I had the honor of participating in the recent workshop of the African Network for Localisation (ANLoc) in Ain Sukhna (or Sokhna, perhaps a colloquial pronunciation?), Egypt from 31 March to 2 April 2009. The actual location there was the Mövenpick Hotel.

ANLoc is a project including several subprojects and a network of the organizations involved in those efforts, and in localization in general. In effect it is addressing several pieces of what might rightly be regarded as the "foundation" for more effective localization of software and content in African languages. These include:

• Fonts - Many African languages are written in Latin-based orthographies that include extended characters (modified forms of other letters, often part of the IPA alphabet) and or diacritics that are not found or rare in European languages. Even though all (or almost all) are encoded in Unicode, not many fonts include them yet. This subproject aims to extend some open-source fonts to include such characters.


• Keyboards - Input of characters not provided for in traditional keyboard layouts requires conceptualizing and designing layouts to accommodate such needs. This is more complex than simple assignment of new characters in a keyboard driver, since issues of anticipating user needs and the possible standardization across languages within a country and across different orthographies in different countries are involved.


• Language and ICT Policy - There are two major areas of policy (especially of African governments, but also of other entities like development organizations and even industry) that impact the potential for localization - language and ICT policies. Although many do not agree with me, I see the overlap of these two policy areas as an emerging category of policy - "localization (L10n) policy."


• Locales - A locale (or locale data for a language and geographic location, generally a country) help computers accommodate different language profiles on computers and facilitate localization of software. Developing locales is a key to full presence of African languages in ICT.


• Localisation Tools - Localization of a software requires expertise in the software and knowledge of the language in which it is to be localized. Not many people have skills in both areas, and even assembling teams that group such expertise is sometimes difficult. Localization tools are really softwares to make the technical aspect of localization easy enough that people with only the requisite language skills can do it.


• Localise software - This is the object of a lot of the above, and the ANLoc project is sponsoring some pilot initiatives for actual open-source software localization. (One imagines that a future phase of ANLoc might take this on more fully, once the "foundation" work is more complete.)


• Spell checkers - A key to production of text in any language these days is good spell checkers. Although it might seem straightforward, spell checkers sometimes require a lot of work to accommodate the particularities of how a language may generate words in different contexts.


• Terminology - How often have you heard in discussion about an African language and technology of any sort that there is no way to say such-and-such in the language? There is a certain truth to the assertion, but it obscures the fact that terms for anything in recent technologies comes from something else or is outright invented. Carrying this process over to several African languages is the object of this subproject.


• Training - ANLoc will cosponsor some trainings related to localization.


• Network activities - As a complex project of sub-projects (which together form a network), ANLoc will hold verious meetings.

The workshop in Ain Sokhna provided the opportunity to discuss these various efforts, coordination among them, and suggestions by participants.

What did the International Year of Languages mean for Africa?

With the formal conclusion of the International Year of Languages (IYL) on International Mother Language Day, I'd like to take a moment to ask: What did the IYL mean for Africa?

With any such observances, any analysis right afterward will of course not be able to take account of long-term or latent effects (e.g., people or organizations whose awareness was raised and whose later action is somehow affected). Nevertheless it's worth at least looking at what has been done.

A glance at the calendar of events in and outside of Africa shows a diversity of observance (this list is far from comprehensive, so pointers to other events and more information are invited):

• 5-7 March - Southern Africa Regional Conference on "National Policies: The role of cross-border languages and the place of lesser used languages" (sponsored by ACALAN and held in Johannesburg, South-Africa). See Minister Z. P. Jordan's keynote address c
• 22-24 April - East Africa Regional Conference on "National Policies: The role of cross-border languages and the place of lesser used languages" (sponsored by ACALAN and held in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania.) No link found.
• 28 May - Conférence-débat « Les langues africaines, facteur d'intégration » (tenu à l'UNESCO, Paris dans le cadre de la Journée (semaine) de l'Afrique, qui avait comme thème « Langues africaines et l’enfant africain »)
• 18 October - Launch of the International Year of Languages in Botswana (per article in Mmegi)
• 23 October - Golden jubilee of Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart. This famous Nigerian author now intends to translate this work into his first language, Igbo.
• 28 Oct. - 4 Nov. - "Somalia: The Word and the Way to a Better World" (Somali Literature Festival with a "Somali Language and Literature Day" and touring book display, in London). Alternate link.

In addition there has been mention of the IYL in various press articles in different countries. A few have been linked on the AfricanLanguages list (try searching "International Year"). Special mention should be made of a blog posting and video entitled "Orphan's Lullaby" by South African author Alex Smith to mark the close of the IYL (note the various translations in text).

The IYL also marked the beginning of the African Network for Localisation (ANLoc), a 3-year project which succeeded the PanAfrican Localisation project. These are part of a program of the International Development Research Centre (IDRC) of Canada to support development of ICT in African languages.

African locales

Speaking of ANLoc, one of its subprojects that is working on compiling locales for African languages. A press release timed just before IMLD and the end of IYL appeals for help in this effort:

Thu, 19/02/2009 - 11:00
PRESS RELEASE: FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Pan-African researchers unlock computers for African languages on Mother Language Day

In celebration of International Mother Language Day, a Pan African Network of computer and language experts is ensuring that computers are unlocked for mother tongue speakers.

ANLoc, The African Network for Localisation (pronounced Unlock), is a Pan-African network undertaking a number of projects to help eliminate technological barriers that prevent computers from being used by mother tongue speakers.

International Mother Language Day is hosted on 21 February each year by UNESCO and aims at raising awareness of mother tongue usage.

To celebrate International Mother Tongue Day the ANLoc locales sub-project is undertaking a special community driven push to enable African language technology. The locales sub-project is focused on creating 100 new African locales. A locale is a set of data that guides a computer to adapt to the local language and country. Locales contain information that instructs a computer on how to write essential basic information, such as the days of the week and month names in a given language, and how to write the monetary values for a given country. Once locale data is in place, Africans often enjoy a first class computer experience for the very first time. Locales impact how well a computer's spell checker works, finding and indexing of African language documents and searching using tools like Google.

The ANLoc Network is encouraging African language speakers in African and the diaspora to celebrate International Mother Language Day by helping to develop a locale for their language. Those wanting to contribute can visit http://o2.it46.se/afrigen to find out more about the importance and need for locales and how to contribute one for their language.

Information about the ANLoc Network and the various projects being undertaken to eliminate technological barriers for African language in the digital age can be found here at http://africanLocalisation.net.

Bamako triptych, and resuming again

Since my last posting, which was after returning from a trip to Bamako, I haven't had the time to do much with this blog. Circumstances have changed somewhat, though the focus of my work and essence of the ideas that I am developing are much the same.

The title of this entry remembers that trip to Bamako and alludes to a recent conference on languages and an ongoing one on African development, both in the same city. More on those below.

This blog in the mix of things

This blog, to review, is focused on African languages, ICT and development, with attention to some related matters. I've given particular attention to language-development links.

In addition to the postings, I have arrayed in the left sidebar feeds from a number of lists relating to these subjects, especially the language-ICT links. Part of the concept is that even when I am not posting actively, there is changing & updating material (or links to same). I intend to do more with the main part of this blog but it really is a question of time.

Two things not in the left sidebar that I have been working on in some of my online time over the last few months are two projects on my personal/professional site, donosborn.org: another blog, "Multidisciplinary Perspectives," which concerns a wider rage of topics (and facilitates exploring some ideas); and a collection of information on the International Year of Languages (which is about to end).

Bamako last year and now

My trip to Bamako in May 2008 was mainly an opportunity for Dwayne Bailey, project lead of the African Network for Localisation (ANLoc) and me to meet with Adama Samassekou and his colleagues at the African Academy of Languages (ACALAN). ACALAN, which is now part of the African Union, has been collaborating with UNESCO and to a lesser degree IDRC on issues of linguistic diversity and ICT. It is hoped to work more with them on issues relating to localization of ICT in African languages.

In January (2009/1/19-21), ACALAN hosted a conference involving UNESCO and the MAAYA linguistic diversity network called the Bamako International Forum on Multilingualism. Billed as "A first step towards a World Summit on Multilingualism," this event treated aspects of multilingualism with anaccent on Africa.

Interesting to note that this month - 2009/2/19-21 - the ninth Forum de Bamako is being held. Exactly one month later and in the same hotel as the conference on multilingualism, one wonders if this conference on development (with the theme this year of governance) will boach the topic of languages in development and governance in multilingual societies.

I have not been able to attend either of these two meetings, but I look forward to seeing the Action Plan from the former and the proceedings of the latter. Hopefully I can then follow up with some comments.

In the meantime, I'm trying to catch up on various work, notably for ANLoc on policy relating to localization (language and ICT).

Two more stars fall

I need to post soon on the trip to Bamako, but wanted to quickly note two more sudden departures: Guido Sohne and Steve Cisler.

On return from Bamako I heard that Guido Sohne died suddenly earlier this month in Nairobi. Guido was from Ghana and an IT specialist. I did not know him well but we had corresponded occasionally on various items and networked on LinkedIn (which he first invited me and many others to join about 5 years ago) and Facebook. He was age 34, but had already left a mark. Some postings about him were made on the BytesforAll_Readers list. Very sad that he had to go so soon.

Steve Cisler also passed away this month in San Jose, California. I had even less contact with him, and that a while back when I was first getting interested in the links between L10n and what we now call ICT4D. He was known for, among other things his work on community networking. I only today learned, thanks to Kelly Morris on Togo-L, that Steve had been a Peace Corps volunteer in Togo a decade before my service there. Some folks who knew him have posted comments and retrospectives: CommunityNetworking2008’s Weblog, Wired, Culture Hacks, Tingilinde, The Real Paul Jones, Paul's Web Space 2.0, BytesforAll_Readers, and others.

May their memories continue to inspire us...

Closing the Xhosa Wikipedia?

A proposal to close the Xhosa Wikipedia has been made, and for some of us it raises some questions about how the Wikimedia Foundation deals with less-resourced languages, such as those in Africa. The bottom line here is really why there is little participation in African language editions of Wikipedia, and what the most appropriate course of action is - closing and eventually deleting, or finding ways to connect with communities that can work on them.

It is worth remembering that Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia, expressed its vision in this way: "The fundamental idea of Wikipedia is to create and give away a freely licensed encyclopaedia in every language of the world." What does/should this vision mean in terms of how African language content and communities are developed?

The Xhosa language (called isiXhosa in the language itself) is spoken by about 7-8 million people and is one of South Africa's official languages. In theory, it would seem like one of the African languages most likely to succeed on Wikipedia, so the questions the proposal for closure raise are quite pointed. Personally I think that there is a marketing issue here - but clearly the reasons for lack of connection need to be examined thoroughly. It's not just as simple as "there is no interest."

Meetings in recent weeks

Over the last few weeks I've had some interesting meetings in which topics related to African languages have been raised, but that I haven't gotten around to reporting here, including several at the University of Pennsylvania, the new National Museum of Language, the Center for Applied Linguistics, ACTFL (the dedication of their new office), and with Mrs. Ntombenhle Nkosi, CEO of the Pan South African Language Board (PanSALB). Will travel tonight to Bamako for meetings with ACALAN and other organizations there.

Remembering Sonja Fagerberg-Diallo

I was surprised and saddened to learn of the passing of Dr. Sonja Fagerberg-Diallo last month. (Un article en français ici.) Her quietly remarkable career was cut short last month at age 58 by a sudden critical illness. She is particularly known as a linguist specialized in Pulaar (a dialect of the Fula language) and for her long-time work on literacy and publication in Pulaar and other Senegalese languages through ARED (Associates in Research and Education for Development), a small non-governmental organization she headed in Dakar.

Others will be able to write more thorough tributes to Sonja's work and contributions than I can. Among past descriptions of ARED include a description on the UNESCO Institute for Lifelong Learning and a 2004 paper by John Hutchison. All I can do is say that Sonja's work was important to me as a language learner, and later one of the inspirations for much of what I've been trying to do with Bisharat (which although quite different in its mission and approach from ARED, shares a fundamentally similar vision). Nevertheless, I thought I could also offer a few snapshots from my personal perspective. Although I did not know her well, I did have the opportunity to meet her and members of her immediate family over the years, to benefit from her learning materials and example, and to visit the ARED offices.

I first met Sonja in 1984 at the Peace Corps/Mali office in Bamako at about the time that Peace Corps bought into a run of her instruction books (lessons and glossary/grammar) for Fulfulde Maasinankoore, another dialect of Fula. Previously there had been no such learning material for volunteers, so this was a great help to many of us. Then in 1985 when I was in an orientation to Guinea for the first group of volunteers to go there since 1967, it turned out that Sonja's husband Boubacar, was the one running it.

During the time I was in Guinea I had to transit through Dakar several times and had occasion to visit them twice, first on Gorée island and then in Fann. Sonja very kindly shared with Peace Corps/Guinea (which by then was only me) a prepublication version of her instruction manual for the Pular of Fuuta Jalon. (By odd coincidence, one of the villages I worked in - Timbi Madina - was where Boubacar's mother lived, and I occasionally would stop in to say hello - just as a matter of courtesy.)

One thing I really appreciated in Sonja's learning materials for diverse varieties of Fula was the perspective of the language as a whole (as opposed to treating each dialect as an isolate). This was helpful in my negotiating some differences between Maasinankoore and Pular, as well as later research, travel and study.

When I began graduate studies at Michigan State University, I found that Sonja was known for her work among linguists there, such as Prof. David Dwyer, who made possible my work on a Fulfulde lexicon, and was good friends with noted historian of Senegal and West Africa, Prof. David Robinson. I had occasional direct communication with her notably concerning the lexicon, which was compiled from extant sources including her extensive glossary for her Maasinankoore (mentioned above). Some years later, one of the communications involved the possibility of developing a larger on-line Fula dictionary and we agreed that a good framework for this would be Christiane Seydou's notable dictionary of Fula roots (the language is based on nomino-verbal roots and it is logical to organize a lexicon by them).

While in Niger I made the connection with Prof. Martha O'Kennon concerning machine translation online for Fula, and in that process also connected her with Sonja, who in turn helped Martha with some points (we focused mainly on Pulaar and to a lesser degree on Maasinankoore).

In 2005 I had the chance to visit Sonja at the ARED office in Dakar (as mentioned in the 2005-9-12 posting on this blog). It was at this time that I got a fuller impression of the extend of ARED's publication efforts over the years. Sonja also related some anecdotes about how a few of the people who became literate in Pulaar went on to write and publish in the language. All of this being a testimony to the work of Sonja and the ARED staff - and indeed of the vision that motivated them.

Finally I crossed paths with Sonja last year at the ACAL/ALTA conference in Gainesville, Florida (which was mentioned in the 2007-9-21 posting on this blog). I had the chance to sit down and talk with her about some technical aspects of ARED's work, but most notable was her address to the conference in plenary on March 23, "Publishing as the Documentation of a Language: The Role of Literacy and Publishing in both the Standardization and the Development of the Pulaar Language" (I hope the paper will be included in the proceedings). This was a really nice introduction to the vision and work of ARED.

Sonja's vision as I understand it might be stated this way: Literacy and education are key to development in its fullest sense, those must include and begin with first languages in order to be most effective, and programs that work at the grassroots are a key element to successfully accomplishing all of the above.

These are just a few personal recollections that in no way do justice to Sonja's career. One hopes in any event that the results of her efforts, which although cut short were still considerable, will inspire others to keep ARED and similar initiatives going and growing.

Farming words: Agricultural development still mute on languages?

A friend and former colleague, Jonathon Landeck, once remarked that "it's hard to build food security on the backs of illiterate farmers." I think again of this in light of a recent UN press release (seen on H-West-Africa) about a call for "greater investments in agriculture and rural development to boost economic growth and reduce poverty in Africa" by Kanayo Nwanze, Vice-President of IFAD. This call seems to be at the confluence of two recent trends - increasing attention to African agriculture and various appeals for more funds for African development generally. It's really not that new a trend (see for instance this call from FAO in 2004) and indeed there have been funds pledged for this kind of thing (such as by the Gates and Rockefeller foundations in 2006). So it is all the more important to take a look again at what is missing in these calls and announcements.

Educated farmers - key to development or threat to stability?

It is deliberately provocative to put the question in this way, but the issue of "empowering" rural people and communities - a concept central to the development discourse - involves learning and action. This is not an abstract or tangential issue to fundamentals like enough food. I once asked a former professor about what he thought was the key problem (if one had to name one) to improving agriculture in Africa. His response? Education of farmers.

This is not to downplay the importance of structural economic and policy issues, various fundamental resource issues, the role of research and extension, or the utility of "greater investments." But it points to something that runs obliquely to the general emphasis in agricultural development on technical issues and on farmers as needing outside knowledge, guidance and resources. "Education" is more than just telling people what we think they need to know or do.

When I was a Peace Corps volunteer many years ago I recall hearing in the extension services that the "paysans sont les ignorants" - farmers and rural people don't know anything. The notion of "éduquer les paysans" (educating the farmers) was really about telling them to do certain things and not to do others. Or convincing them that some new thing was really better for them. (Or in some cases obliging them to do something.) I think that mindset has been ameliorated somewhat over the years, but the idea of rural people as recipients and potential beneficiaries is still pretty much fundamental.

Farmers are no fools, however, and at the very least can calculate risks and potential benefits based on a lot of experience and local knowledge. The "ignorant" farmers were sometimes smart enough to seem dumb.

Education as I think my professor meant it, and as I use it here, is more about capacities, ways of understanding, and new knowledge in context. How to help farmers figure things out, get the information they need, and integrate new and indigenous knowledge - in short, how to enhance the abilities of farmers to make decisions that work for them and their communities.

A question, though, arises, and that is whether rural people so "empowered" is what governments and donors really want, or whether farmers who can ably make use of technical packages provided by extension services and development projects is preferred.

Farmers work in the vernacular - can development work with that?

In southeastern Mali, cotton farmers in the 1990s used literacy skills in the most widely spoken language, Bambara, to organize a major union - SYCOV (since French is the country's official language, SYCOV apparently keeps all documents in Bambara and French). In 2006, a "farmers' jury" on genetically modified Bt cotton was organized in Sikasso, Mali by IIED - and its main working language was Bambara (the report reflects this; Dr. Michel Pimbert of IIED kindly made that explicit in response to a question I asked in 2006 before seeing the report).

Farmers' first languages and local lingua francas are undeniably important if not central to education and sustainable agricultural development, but is enabling rural people to more effectively use them seen as dangerous by governments and troublesome by development donors? After all, what did farmers do in southeastern Mali with their literacy skills? - unionize and vote against GM crops. When I was in Niger, a colleague suggested that the downgrading or abandonment of local literacy programs by the Nigerien government some years before was exactly because of concern that farmers might get too active.

Indeed, local extension agencies themselves may not like the idea of farmers knowing too much, regardless of what language is used: Peter Easton and Guy Belloncle mentioned in a 2000 report (p. 4) a local research program that was quashed because the extension service "judged it inadmissible to try out with local farmers types of experimentation its own extension agents had not mastered."

And it is common to hear foreign development experts dismiss local languages as too many or too costly to try to do any concerted work in. Questionnaires may be useful, translations as needed by people in the field may be necessary, but much beyond that doesn't usually get attention.

There are so many rationales for not investing in use of African languages in agriculture and rural development, but if we accept that education and "empowerment" of farmers are key factors, is it possible to keep putting it off as if it were unimportant, while pouring new money into old approaches?

Structural issue: Language in the discourse on agricultural development

I mentioned on this blog last year having made (extensive) comments on a report about science and technology for African development. I looked not long ago at the final version of the report - revised after input from readers like me - and from what I could tell there was only one additional mention of the factor of language in one of the chapters. And that mention was in the context of challenges, not proposed approaches. A large part of the issue I think is disciplinary - language is for linguists; agriculture for a range of technical disciplines, economics, and perhaps other social sciences.

How then can the attention of donors, governments, extension agencies, and development organizations who are concerned with enhancing agriculture and investing in development in Africa, be drawn to the importance of doing much more in and with the first languages and local lingua francas of rural Africans? How can we at least research and develop approaches that convey information and promote ways of working in the languages that farmers and their communities speak among themselves?

There are some complex questions in this - one is under no illusion that it's a simple matter of adding "language" to project proposals and paying some translators here and there. But a policy on the part of major agricultural research and rural development actors to explicitly treat farmers' languages seriously in agricultural development in Africa would be a good start, and then some resources to determine optimal ways of using those languages in education, extension and new programs could have a significant impact.

Development NGOs and African languages

I've been e-mailing some non-governmental organizations involved in African development about the role of African languages in their work. This is an exploratory research on a small scale that hopefully will help further research in related areas. The core text of the letter follows:

In order to better understand the evolving field, and how my range of expertise can best respond to and inform organizations like yours that administer development projects in Africa, I am soliciting feedback from the management of various such organizations. My operating assumption, which is supported in some literature as well as personal experience, is that in the multilingual settings that predominate in Africa, language is largely overlooked as a factor in the success or not of development and education programs (although in the field of primary education there is increasing attention to the issue of mother-tongue/bilingual instruction). Choice of language(s) in development has potential impact on factors critical to project success and sustainability, such as communication, participation, learning, and integration with indigenous knowledge.

What is at issue now is verifying this view and understanding specifics and needs concerning language in development organizations. My questions are as follows and I would be most grateful if you or any of your staff could respond. This is not a formal survey, but the knowledge gained may help move in that direction.

1) In the planning or management of your projects in Africa, does the issue of choice of languages to use arise in any level of work? (i.e., from the planning itself, to management, to communications within the projects and with and among the beneficiaries?)

2) If these projects use more than one language, are the roles of these languages parallel (i.e., all languages used on all levels) or stratified (for example, English used at the top, another more frequently among the staff, and then local languages among the benficiaries)?

3) If several languages are used, is translation necessary and how is it used?
3a) In the case of translation into & from African languages, on which level and by who is it done? (For example, in my rural development experience, translation tended to be ad hoc and in the field. However some crop research activities have begun to translate questionnaires into farmers' first languages before these are administered in the field in order to remove the variable of alternate or incorrect translations.)

4) Can you characterize the attitudes of projects' management and staff towards the languages of the beneficiaries?

My ultimate hope in this effort is to contribute to more effective use of African languages in development, from "traditional" development activities to the uses of information technology.

Question #2 is modified from the original in response to a comment: "stratified" replaces "hierarchical." The origin of this question is the observation that all multilingualisms are not the same. In Europe apparently the tendency is for a speaker to use, or be able to use, multiple languages in all ranges of expression. In Africa on the other hand, the pattern apparently is more often speakers using different languages for different contexts, but maybe no language for all ranges.

I hope to have more to write on this topic as I receive more responses.

Linguapax Prize 2008 to Neville Alexander

The recipient of the Linguapax Prize for 2008 is Dr. Neville Alexander of South Africa. The prize is awarded annually (since 2000) in recognition of contributions to linguistic diversity and multilingual education.

Although the Linguapax site does not at this writing have updated information, the website of the UNESCO Centre of Catalonia (which is connected with Linguapax) has this press release dated 22.02.2008:

The South African linguist Neville Alexander will receive the Linguapax Award today in Barcelona, on the occasion of the Mother Language Day. The ceremony is framed in the Intercultural Week organised by the Ramon Llull University. Alexander, who coordinates the Project for the Study of Alternative Education in South Africa has devoted more than twenty years of his professional life to defend and preserve multilingualism in the post-apartheid South Africa and has become one of the major advocates of linguistic diversity.

There is various material online about Dr. Alexander including:

• A brief bio on the South African LitNet site
• An interview for PBS about his imprisonment on Robben Island at about the same time as Nelson Mandela.
• An article about a talk he gave at the University of Minnesota in 2007
• A page with a list of some of his writing (with links)

Dr. Alexander is the second African to be awarded the Linguapax Prize. Prof. Maurice Tadadjeu of the Univeristy of Yaoundé in Cameroon received it in 2005.

What's up with the Bureau of Ghana Languages?

In the previous entry, I inserted a quote (from an article about International Mother Language Day in Ghana) about books being locked up in the warehouses of the Bureau of Ghana Languages (BGL). Actually the point of that was that the supply is there, but that somehow the demand is not connecting with it - so the books remain, presumably, boxed and stacked, in storage.

Another article from Ghana on IMLD (Accra Daily Mail, "Any hope for local Ghanaian languages ... As thousands of others worldwide face extinction?" 26 Feb 08) mentions the BGL in a way that raises another issue:

The Bureau of Ghana Languages is poorly resourced and exists all but in name. The sorry and dying state of the Bureau is a reflection of where Ghana's local languages are heading.

So, what's happening? BGL is producing materials that are evidently not flying off the shelves, and it is apparently underfunded and giving the impression - at least to the author of one article - of being moribund. I'm curious to hear any more about the situation.

At the same time I recently looked again at the website of another institution in Ghana, the Ghana-India Kofi Annan Centre of Excellence in ICT / Advanced Information Technology Institute. It has international attention and partnerships, adequate funding, and an apparent dynamism. I presume that's a reflection, at least in part, of Ghanaian government and foreign donor priorities. BGL may not be able to command the same attention, but what about some sort of partnerships? KACE/AITI is apparently looking at some localization, and BGL presumably has the language expertise. BGL might do well to expand its perspectives beyond traditional printing, and KACE/AITI has expertise in ICT - the direction in which content development in all languages is going.

Anyway these are some questions and thoughts. Institutions and agencies like BGL in various African countries often struggle with little in the way of funding, technology, official support, and connection with their ultimate consumers / audience. It's probably time to look systematically at what their status is and ways to support their growth and success.

Burning textbooks, beating schoolchildren

African languages have not only been passed over as languages of instruction and even omitted from school curricula in much of Africa, they have in some cases been actively excluded. While a full discussion of the issues involved would take something much longer than a blog post, I wanted to review a few facts and anecdotes. It should be noted that the worst abuses were in the colonial past.

Burning Tigre textbooks

One of the more striking examples from Ghirmai Negash's article (see the previous entry) was how in the 1970s in Eritrea, the ELF declared illegal a school curriculum in the Tigre language and ordered all copies of the school book to be burned.

This may be an extreme example but one from Madagascar in the 1980s may be more typical. Apparently the government of Madagascar at one point needed foreign assistance to produce textbooks for its schools. At the time the instruction was in Malagasy, but when France offered aid, it was with materials in French. (Unfortunately I don't have the reference at hand). It has been noted elsewhere that the UK and US are very forthcoming with materials in English. It would be hard to say how often English, French or Portuguese materials have replaced African language ones, or to what degree their availability has been a disincentive to develop African language materials.

Even when there are materials in African languages, they are not always well distributed. The article on International Mother Language Day in Ghana (available here, and mentioned in an earlier posting) mentions:

It is however very pathetic to note that while schools complain of lack of Ghanaian Language books which affects the teachers' delivery of lessons and consequently the performance of their pupils in their schools, publications of the Bureau [of Ghanaian Languages] are locked up in our ware houses in Tamale and Accra and are not being patronised.

So at least in some cases, books for learning in African languages have been burned, replaced by books in other languages, or "locked up" in warehouses. This is not even to mention those that are out of print and only available in distant libraries.

Beating or shaming schoolchildren for speaking their mother tongue

The history of schooling in Africa has many stories of how African languages were excluded from classes and school grounds (not always, but in many places) and punishments were meted out for transgressing the rule. I recently posed a question on the H-Africa list about the degree to which this is still happening. (It does still happen, but probably not as extreme as in the past.)

It is not only a question of teachers punishing students but also ways of involving peers in the punishment (see this example from a blog on Lesotho). There are some other links here (post #8).

Role of African languages for development

The African Academy of Languages uses the slogan "African languages for African development." Unfortunately there is not yet a strong body of literature linking language and development in Africa. There are several works of note that discuss African languages from various perspectives - linguistic and sociolinguistic aspects to language and education policies. However few works make the case for greater and more effective use of Africa's first languages in development plans and programs.

Probably the only book-length treatment of the role of African languages in development is Clinton Robinson's Language Use in Rural Development: An African Perspective (Walter de Gruyter, 1996). This is a valuable work, but is more a book on micro-level linguistics in a development context and does not connect with some of the main development concerns. (Dr. Robinson now works with UNESCO on literacy issues.)

Part of the reason I'm writing about this topic now is that I recently saw on the "Sociolingo’s African Linguistics" blog reference to an article entitled "Globalization and the Role of African Languages for Development" by Ohio University English professor Ghirmai Negash. Although written in 2005, the paper apparently has just been made available online. It is a welcome addition to the literature on language and development in Africa.

Dr. Negash's perspective is a macro one. Building from a consideration of Africa's responses to globalization, and considering aspects of the African condition like the "division between the population and the elite" (which has linguistic dimensions explored in other literature), he argues that "African languages could be the most critical element for Africa’s survival, and cultural, educational and economic development." His discussion revolves around a central question - "How can Africans meaningfully connect with and respond to the demands of the global order, without compromising their cultural values?" - and touches on some important points.

I won't attempt a full review here, but will say that the fact of Dr. Negash's reviewing and rebutting some of the common objections to increased use of African language is useful. He also brings in examples and references that I found interesting and helpful.

Nevertheless, in this relatively sparsely covered (but nevertheless very important) field of language and development in Africa, my general impression is that the articles I'm aware of often tend to recycle arguments (which is to some extent necessary), and that in some cases, it is not clear whether authors are aware of all the existing relevant literature. Part of the problem is that this is an interdisciplinary field that includes a big "divide" between linguistics on the one side and development studies on the other (I've referred to previously to this, on Sept. 22, 2007).

At this point in time maybe one essential resource would be a comprehensive bibliography - and that would have to be structured (topically) based on a particular understanding of relevant topics (i.e., some works in development relating to subjects like participation or development communication might be relevant even where they do not specifically mention language).

Before concluding this entry, I will mention that the topic of Dr. Negash's paper elicited a small exchange of views on the lgpolicy-list just recently.

International Mother Language Day

Today is the ninth annual observance of International Mother Language Day (IMLD) and the date of formal launching of the International Year of Languages (IYL). (See also my previous posting about the IYL on 31 Jan.)

A few mentions of IMLD in the African press:

• In Gambia, the Banjul paper Daily Observer had an article entitled "2008 - the Year Ahead in Education." Dated on 16 January, it mentioned both IMLD and the IYL.
• In South Africa, the African National Congress newsletter ANC Today (Vol. 8, No. 6 • 15-21 Feb. 2008) featured a letter from its president, Jacob G. Zuma entitled "Our Languages Matter!" (it can also be read here). He uses the occasion of IMLD & the launch of the IYL to highlight the importance of all the country's languages and ways in which their use should be supported.
• In Ghana, the Daily Graphic of 20 Feb. 2008 included a feature article entitled "International Mother Tongue Day" (from the ModernGhana.com site; it can also be read here). It is a very interesting discussion of issues relating to use of Ghanaian languages, such as popular attitudes, policy, and education.

Accessing the Internet in Lusoga?

A recent article in the magazine of the Ugandan newspaper East African, with the odd title of "Mother tongue interference on the Internet" (also available here) discusses Kiganira Deogracious Kijambu's "dream that one day he will access the Internet in Lusoga, his mother tongue." He's described as having developed a successful "e-commerce agricultural business."

The latter fact is significant. There is I think a tendency to discount the utility of local language content or interfaces in a medium that knows no local boundaries. E-commerce in a language with just over million speakers? Even if one considers that Lusoga is very close to Luganda, which has a few million more first & second language speakers, this is still relatively small in the global scheme of things.

I've even tended to emphasize not e-commerce in my discussions of African languages and ICT for rural development, but rather information for extension and building on local technical knowledge. So this article is a welcome reality check as it were. If you're planning to expand use of ICT for any kind of rural development in Africa, don't discount the languages that farmers and their communities speak in their work.

The next question is how to link Mr. Kijambu with others in Africa and beyond who can help this dream become a practical reality. More on that later.

Linking L10n & ICT4D: Bring back AfAgrICT-L?

One way of describing my focus in working on Bisharat and the PanAfrican Localisation project is linking localization (L10n) of information and communications technology (ICT) with ICT for development (ICT4D) in Africa. Last October I framed this as a question on the LinkedIn network in this way: How to promote better integration & synergism among ICT4D & L10n activities in Africa?

It's an ongoing concern and a question that needs to be returned to from time to time. Therefore I will try to periodically revisit this issue here with specific news, questions or ideas. One of those follows:

Bring back AfAgrICT-L?

About 9 years ago, an email list called "AfAgrICT-L" was set up to facilitate communication about use of ICTs in African agriculture and natural resource management. It was set up by CTA, hosted by Bellanet. Its origins go back to 1995 as described on this page (retrieved from the Wayback Machine), and was intended to "be operational for at least 1 year, after which its continued use and relevance will be re-evaluated." Its purposes were described as:

• Identify and indicate key ICT issues and strategies relevant to agricultural development and natural resource management in Africa;
• Improve the common pool of knowledge and expertise available in this area;
• Identify relevant projects and expertise that could assist in defining strategies
• Provide a mechanism for monitoring technical developments and electronic information sources which can benefit those working in the area of agriculture, rural development and natural resource management.

I discovered AfAgrICT-L in late 1999 and participated on it until it faded out in 2001 or so. It was a brief period, but left an impression. CTA called it "influential." Yet it was closed.

There is now renewed focus on African agriculture as central to African development, and at the same time ICT4D (and ICT in general) is only getting more important in the region. A forum for these topics - ICT, ICT4D, and African agriculture - seems even more timely now than it was several years ago. Of course one could start a website or a list in a short time, but I'm thinking that to revive this known project, and adapt it to the evolving situation, could be of great use for professionals, researchers, and program managers in the coming years.

Then there is the L10n dimension - ICT in African languages. Farmers and rural communities rely even more on African languages than urban areas, and local environmental and agricultural knowledge are embedded in their langauges and cultures. L10n and ICT(4D) in agriculture and NRM would seem to be a natural combination, and support for L10n is much further along now than it was before. So one added dimension for a new AfAgrICT-L could be the intersection of the technical concerns with how to incorporate and adapt localization as appropriate for different goals.

So, is it time to bring back AfAgrICT-L in a new form?

CTA's ICT Update: "Language Technology"

Having mentioned CTA, I should also note that their ICT Update Issue 40 (Dec. 2007) is devoted to the theme "Language Technology." I had the privilege of contributing one of the articles, "Localizing Languages."

2008, International Year of Languages: Languages Matter!

This year has been declared the International Year of Languages by the United Nations. Official observance is being coordinated by UNESCO.

One of the things we can hope for is that the time and focus on languages can in Africa be used to forward the efforts begun in the Year of African Languages (2006).

Personally I've been collecting some links and ideas about the Year and how to support it on a section of my personal site.