Programming Africans' linguistic needs

The International Herald Tribun: "Swahili speakers wishing to use a 'kompyuta' - as computer is rendered in Swahili - have been out of luck when it comes to communicating in their tongue. Computers, no matter how bulky their hard drives or sophisticated their software packages, have not yet mastered Swahili or hundreds of other indigenous African languages.

There are economic reasons for the outreach. Microsoft, which is working to incorporate Swahili into Microsoft Windows, Microsoft Office and other popular programs, sees a market for its software among the roughly 100 million Swahili speakers in East Africa. The same goes for Google, which last month launched www.google.co.ke, offering a Kenyan version in Swahili of the popular search engine.

But the campaign to Africanize cyberspace is not all about the bottom line. There are hundreds of languages in Africa - some spoken only by a few dozen elders - and they are dying out at an alarming rate.

The continent's linguists see the computer as one important way of saving them. Unesco estimates that 90 percent of the world's 6,000 languages are not represented on the Internet, and that one language is disappearing somewhere around the world every two weeks.

Adegbola, the executive director of the African Languages Technology Initiative, has developed a keyboard able to deal with the complexities of Yoruba, a tonal language. Different Yoruba words are written the same way using the Latin alphabet - the tones that differentiate them are indicated by extra punctuation. It can take many different keystrokes to complete a Yoruba word.

To accomplish the same result with fewer, more comfortable keystrokes, Adegbola made a keyboard without the letters Q, Z, X, C and V, which Yoruba does not use. He repositioned the vowels, which are high-frequency, to more prominent spots and added accent marks and other symbols, creating what he calls Africa's first indigenous language keyboard. Now, Adegbola is at work on voice recognition software that can convert spoken Yoruba into text.

Related research is under way in Ethiopia. Amharic, the official language, has 345 letters and letter variations, which has made developing a coherent keyboard difficult. Further complicating the project, the country also has its own system of time and its own calendar.

One of Microsoft's motivations in localizing its software is to try to head off the movement toward open-source operating systems like Linux, which are increasingly popular. South Africa has already adopted Linux, which it considers more cost-efficient and more likely to stimulate local software development.

Patrick Opiyo, the Microsoft official in charge of the Swahili program, portrays the effort as more about community outreach than business development. Besides Swahili, the company is looking at making its products more available to those who speak Amharic, Zulu and Yoruba and the other two widely used languages in Nigeria - Hausa and Igbo."