Few people who did not grow up speaking Zulu have learned the language later. There are limited resources for second language Zulu learning, whether textbooks, readers, or computerised resources. We set out to develop software for this purpose, to support learners' independent learning. Drawing on research on language learning, we used a number of…

Translating a text from one language to another poses problems to the translator. The task becomes more enormous when translating from a well developed language to a developing one. It even becomes more complex when dealing with a technical text. While the English language belongs to the Anglo-Saxon group, Igbo language belongs to the Congo Basin.…

Even a quick glance at international data reveals something troubling: There is an increasing economic and educational gap between Africa and the rest of the world. If we look just a bit deeper, we find that economic and educational stagnation may simply be the inevitable outcomes of broad educational failure for millions of rural African…

This paper views Nigeria as a multilingual country with diverse languages and cultures to the extent that the total number of languages spoken right now in Nigeria is about 500 (See Adegbite 2010). This linguistic diversity in the country has occasioned the development and the spread of the concepts of bilingualism, multilingualism, diglossia and…

(Purpose) The purpose of this article is to provide a detailed description of the pronouns in Akebu. Akebu is a language spoken in South-West Togo and in the neighboring towns in Ghana. Akebu belongs to a group of languages formerly called "Togo Remnant Languages", now (Ghana Togo Mountains, GTM). The native Akebu speakers call their…

Presents typology of main areas of language contact in Nigeria and diagrams those requiring translation in public domains. (BK)

The cultural interplay in Africa between indigenous, Islamic, and Western legacies has given rise to four language types described as Afro-ethnic, Afro-Islamic, Afro-Western, and Western. Their definitions, tendencies, and characteristics in writing, geographic spread, demographic distribution, and functional value are discussed. (10 references)…

This report provides data on standard and non-standard African language varieties occurring in urban areas of South Africa, drawn from nine smaller reports. It illustrates the language use patterns in black urban communities and describes the language varieties spoken in them. It was found that the impact of non-standard varieties on the use of…

A discussion of the situation of Idoma, a Nigerian language, begins with different accounts of the language's origin, referring to both local legend and cosmology. It then proceeds to a review of modern linguists' efforts, since 1927, to classify the language. A statistical overview contains information on the number of speakers of Idoma as a…