Young Africans go online to preserve their local languages, fight Covid-19

THE words “face-mask” and “hand sanitiser” are now familiar the world over, but for isiZulu speakers in South Africa those terms did not exist a year ago, until a group of volunteers took to the internet to create them.

From Wikipedia posts in indigenous tongues to digital word libraries, African language lovers are going online to preserve and create words and content for future generations - an effort that has been given added urgency by the coronavirus pandemic.

“Language is very important, it’s the tool we use to communicate our understanding of the world,” said Perrymason Adams, 39, an accountant in South Africa who volunteers with WikiAfrica, a project to increase Wikipedia content in African languages.

With recurring lockdowns around the world to stem the spread of Covid-19, rights groups warn that the digital divide separating those who can learn and work online from those who cannot deepens already existing inequality.

Online access is growing rapidly in subSaharan Africa, with internet penetration in the region surging to 25 per cent of the population in 2019 against less than one per cent in 2000, according to the World Bank.

But research shows even Africans who can get on the web often struggle to find content they can relate to.

According to the World Economic Forum, one of the main reasons many Africans do not go online when they can is “lack of content in local languages”.

This is a big drive behind WikiAfrica, which since it was launched by the Moleskine Foundation in 2006 has contributed more than 40,000 written entries, as well as images, audio and video files, to the widely popular online encyclopedia.

During the pandemic, translating information around social distancing, masks and sanitisers has become crucial, said Adams, who has volunteered to translate material to isiZulu and isiXhosa, another South African language.

Adams was “mind-blown” when he heard of the initiative two years ago and wanted to keep translating articles during lockdown - on the origins of the new coronavirus, lockdowns and face-masks.

“I knew this information could be lifesaving, I felt like I was being a language activist,” he said, noting that he speaks four languages at home with his family and did the isiZulu translations with his mother.

Volunteers for the WikiAfrica programme translate online content into nearly 20 African languages, including Twi, Swahili, Afrikaans and Dagbani, according to a spokeswoman from the Moleskine Foundation.

The translated articles have been viewed more than 500,000 times, says the nonprofit, which focuses on cultural projects and helps train translators across the continent.

At the start of the pandemic, the organisation’s officials noticed the amount of content about Covid-19 on Wikipedia in African languages was lacking, said chief executive officer and co-founder Adama Sanneh.

“So we created a campaign to say to all the African-language speakers from the continent (and) from the diaspora to say, ‘If you know the language, please translate some of this content from English or French or Portuguese’,” he said.