The Role of Spoken Language Corpora in the Intellectualisation of Indigenous Languages in South Africa
Mtholeni N. Ngcobo · 2010
South Africa is a multilingual country with eleven official languages. Nine of these official languages are indigenous languages and they are not considered as developed compared to English and Afrikaans. The main cited problem is the lack of appropriate terminology that will enable these languages to be used in modern domains of language use such as science and technology. Term creation for the purpose of modernising the indigenous languages of South Africa falls under a process called intellectualisation. This is a process of accelerating the growth and development of languages. In this article we argue that we need to use spoken corpora of these indigenous languages as a strategy in their intellectualisation. Building large spoken language corpora is regarded as the most important first step in the development of adequate language material and other applications. Apart from being rich sources for varied and significant empirical research in linguistic, cultural and natural language processing domains, language corpora have globally become extremely important data base resources for a variety of linguistic, socio- economic, cultural, educational, inter-lingual or inter-communicational and language technological applications and developments (such as in machine translation and human-machine interactions). The spoken corpus approach allowed us to extract and to observe the nature of borrowed terms used by