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The SWiP project makes use of language, data and knowledge technologies to promote language equality among all of South Africa's official languages. The linguistic hegemonic status of English (and to a lesser extent Afrikaans) has resulted in English being the language of learning and teaching[1] which downplays an African epistemology,[2] thus local African languages are commonly under resourced.[3] The acronym"SWiP" describes the three main partners in a national collaboration between SADiLaR, the free encyclopedia Wikipedia and PanSALB who are working alongside local speech and language communities within Academica, to address language equality using digital technologies, especially Wikipedia.[4]
Under apartheid, certain languages were marginalised, including isiNdebele, Siswati, Xitsonga and Tshivenda.[5] To address the underrepresentation of South Africa's indigenous languages, three organisations are collaborating to build better low-resource languages corpora. These organisations are:[6]
- South African Centre for Digital Language Resources (SADiLaR)
- Wikimedia South Africa, (Wikipedia)
- Pan South African Language Board (PanSALB)
Wikipedia is a common source of language data for natural language processing (NLP).[7] Low-resource languages have limited corpora of text (speech data, annotated text and other forms of linguistic data) for LLMs to draw on for NLP. The SWiP project has introduced a variety of alternative possibilities for the collection and compilation of corpora of suitable text for low-resource languages, and rolled this out on a national scale. These corpora can be used to create corpus-based dictionaries or semi-automatic translation.[8]
This collaborative project is also intended to promote, preserve, and digitise South Africa's indigenous languages and cultural knowledge by enhancing their presence on digital platforms such as Wikipedia.[9] By partnering with cultural and linguistic organisations, the project was designed to close the digital gap and ensure that local languages and cultural narratives are preserved and shared online.[6]
- ^ http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1003556
- ^ Ntombela, B X S (2024). "The hegemony of the English language and the plight of African languages: towards linguistic revolution". African Perspectives of Research in Teaching and Learning. 8 (1): 184–195. doi:10.70875/v8i3article14 (inactive 1 May 2025).
{{cite journal}}: CS1 maint: DOI inactive as of May 2025 (link) - ^ Bird, Steven (2022). "Local Languages, Third Spaces, and other High-Resource Scenarios". Proceedings of the 60th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers). Association for Computational Linguistics. pp. 7817–7829. doi:10.18653/v1/2022.acl-long.539.
- ^ https://www.pansalb.org/wp-content/uploads/External-Newsletter-April-2023-March-2024_compressed.pdf
- ^ Mudau, Thama; Jonker, Euane; Maila, Anthony; Malema, Maropeng (2024). "SWiP Project Launch" (PDF). PanSALB News. pp. 8–10.
- ^ a b "The SWiP project brings isiNdebele to Wikipedia's main platform, expanding access and visibility for official South African languages – SADiLaR". sadilar.org. Retrieved 2025-04-14.
- ^ "Wikipedia's value in the age of generative AI". 12 July 2023.
- ^ Setaka-Bapela, M; Van Zaanen, M (July 2024). Corpus-based dictionaries for low-resource languages (PDF). The African Association for Lexicography. Retrieved 15 April 2025.
- ^ "SWiP project to champion SA's indigenous languages online – SADiLaR". sadilar.org. Retrieved 2025-04-14.
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