Crafting African Solutions: Leveraging Homegrown Technologies to Safeguard Linguistic Treasures
Crafting African Solutions: Leveraging Homegrown Technologies to Safeguard Linguistic Treasures
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When a language falls silent, humanity loses not just words, but an entire world. Africa is home to over 2,000 languages, yet for years, its voices have been largely silent in the digital world. It is now crucial to leverage technology not just to preserve these linguistic treasures but to ensure they thrive in the digital age.
This episode of Pan-African Frequency features Nigerian lexicographer, Philip Akoda, building digital bridges between generations, and examines his bold mission to ensure Africa's linguistic heritage survives and thrives in the digital age. He described why it is crucial for Africans to care about the depth and rigor of language documentation, and how Nkanda, his tech startup is helping to preserve the native languages from disappearing.
“Languages are vessels of identity, history, knowledge, and if documentation is shallow or inaccurate, we risk losing words and the worldview embedded in them [...] African poetry is quite different from what we usually see from the conventional European poetry, because there are some times when words are expressed in ways that it's very, you can't really render these words in English or in European languages, because of the depths of these words. And when we come to cultures like the Yoruba culture, the Ifa corpus, for example, the Odo-ifa, it contains quite a wealth of knowledge which can be shared to the world, which is something that a lot of people can learn from [...] one of the things we do at Nkanda, a tech startup is we try to make sure that people are also engaging with dictionaries in fun and interactive ways. And we address this by integrating gamified exercises, word recommendations, quizzes, multimedia etc [...] using technology and modern platforms to amplify our voices in our own language is essential. And I believe remembering and embracing our roots does not limit our global impact, it actually enriches it.” he explained.
Without intervention, languages absent from the digital landscape risk exclusion from education, essential services, and the global economy, accelerating their decline. According to Lexicographer, technology allows us to preserve language in ways that were previously impossible.
“People have been writing for decades. But the problem here is all of this work needs to go to digital space. In order for us to ensure that computers are understanding our languages, we need to make sure that we are training them on all the work we've done in the last 200 years. And it's really important that computers are also speaking the language, just as how we are speaking the languages. I've always emphasized that it's not enough for us these days to teach people our languages, we have to teach computers our languages [...] We're integrating the structures we have built for decades into computers, into LLMs and so that they can have better understanding and enhancement of our languages,” Akoda noted.
Curious to hear more from our guest? Catch the full conversation on the Pan-African Frequency podcast, brought to you by Sputnik Africa.
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