African languages in the information age/Les langues Africaines dans l'age de l'information.

• Author: Okwemba, Arthur

African languages should join English and French as languages of choice on the Internet if the continent is to participate effectively in the information society. A Fund should also be established to help in the production and maintenance of these languages on the Internet as a means of accelerating the number of Africans accessing Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs).

Making these proposals, a group of African linguistics and technology experts attending a recent African Regional Preparatory Conference for the World Summit on Information Society (WSIS) in Accra, Ghana, said they have already developed special characters that can now help these languages be used on cyberspace. They argue that the use of languages such as English in international communication has played a big role in the development of the Western countries because their citizens understand technology as it is instructed in a language they best understand.

African countries too will experience unprecedented development in economic, social, political and technological spheres if they use their mother tongues on the Internet. But some information experts from America and Europe are opposing the idea arguing that African languages do not have economic power and therefore cannot be a force to reckon with when used on the Internet for transactions. They further claim that Africa has over 200 languages, with some having characters and sounds in their alphabet that are not recognizable in the coding system of the Internet. Therefore, the continent should continue expressing itself through appropriate languages in social and economic development.

African leaders are also to blame as much as the West for creating hindrances in the use of African languages on the Internet according to Professor Mwasoko from the University of Dar-es-Salaam.

Speaking at the WSIS meeting in Accra, Professor Salam Diakite, Director of Research and Documentation, African Academy of Languages, said the only way to make African languages accepted in cyberspace is to transact business in those languages. In Kenya, for instance, information on tourism and tea products should be in local languages or in Swahili, which Microsoft is going to launch officially on the Internet between April and May 2005. If this happens, people from Europe and America will have no choice but to learn how to use these languages on the Internet. But this can only occur if the Unicode consortium accepts special characters and sounds found in certain African dialects. 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.

Addressing participants at the Accra conference, Mark Lange, senior attorney at Microsoft, a leading computer software developer, said that they support the idea of African...