Online African Dictionary Speaks Volumes

Online African Dictionary Speaks Volumes
Linguistics site translates 100+ languages
By Adam Harriss
Contributing Writer
What do you say when an African native reaches for your bottle of Heineken? "Ii ni njafi yakwa," "Ishu ni wari wakwa" or "Iwu nyi wari woko?" While each of these phrases means "this is my beer" in a different African language, you'd never know which one to use without the UC Berkeley linguistics department's new Comparative Bantu Online Dictionary.
The dictionary gives English translations for more than 100 Bantu-family languages of sub-Saharan Africa. Linguistics department Chair Larry Hyman, who organized the project, and linguistics Professor John Lowe, the Web site designer, created the online dictionary to provide linguists, anthropologists, ethnobotanists and others interested in the region easy access to linguistic tools. Presently, the Web site provides users with maps of the area in Africa where a given language is spoken and dictionary translations for single words and full sentences.

GETTING THE WORD OUT:
Linguistics department Chair Larry Hyman (left) and graduate students (clockwise from top) Galen Sibanda, Jeri Moxley and Armindo Ngunga put the Bantu language database online.

On Feb. 1, the National Science Foundation renewed a three-year $280,000 grant for the project. The grant allows project coordinators to continue expanding the online dictionary. They hope to eventually document and provide translations for 500 Bantu languages.
"In principle, any student with an interest in the Bantu (speaking) area, a huge part of sub-Saharan Africa, can consult the materials for various purposes, e.g. students in anthropology, history, etc.," said Hyman.
One of the dictionary's sister projects, the Speaking Atlas, produced in Lyon, France, provides students with an audio guide to pronunciation. Since pronunciation varies from village to village, the program allows students to investigate the languages of Gabon, a region of sub-Saharan Africa, by clicking on one of a number of villages and listening to the pronunciation of a word in that town.
But the influence of the online dictionary extends beyond the university community. According to Hyman, the dictionary and its sister projects will allow those interested in Africa greater access to all types of linguistic materials.
"A recent example is a team of epidemiologists working on AIDS in East Africa who needed these materials to study kinship terms who contacted us," said Hyman. "Botanists, zoologists, historians, archeologists, etc. may find the materials useful."
Not only can students and linguists benefit from the site's information, but the dictionary also can benefit from their suggestions.
"I wanted to make clear that this database belongs to the field, to everyone, not to me personally or to the staff," said Hyman. "We thus set up the Web site and we have had numerous visits and exchanges that have shown the great interest in both contributing to and utilizing the growing database."
The site includes the Bantuist Manifesto, a declaration made by linguists before submitting their materials to dictionary that states they will freely exchange materials.
Graduate students from the linguistics department also have a hand in the project. Armindo Agunga, Galen Sibanda and Jeri Moxley worked on developing dictionaries for the Ciyao, Ndebele and Chichewa languages, respectively.
"I'll use the database to look at the changes in the sound for my dissertation," said Moxley.
In comparison to the Spanish language, which has masculine and feminine noun forms, the Bantu language has 20 classifications of nouns, ranging from liquids, animals and trees to abstract concepts like beauty.
Lowe said the technologically advanced dictionary is "one of the first and one of the largest of its kind."
Site designers say the ease of expanding an online dictionary partly accounts for its popularity. Whereas a bound dictionary could only be added to through additional volumes, the online dictionary can be expanded indefinitely.
"As the technology for communication improves, sharing will become more possible and will increase," said Hyman.
He hopes that Bantuists who study the language in Africa will soon have computers sophisticated enough to transmit e-mail files, allowing for the exchange of information.
As part of the project, coordinators restored old dictionaries compiled during Africa's colonial era.
The oldest dictionary in the project dates back to 1899, and Hyman hopes to eventually incorporate many others from this time period. Major publishers own the rights to many of these texts and project coordinators have to obtain permission before using the works.
Hyman recently received permission from the Oxford Press to scan a Luganda dictionary, documenting the most popularly spoken language in Uganda.
"We should create or acquire dictionaries of as many of the approximately 500 Bantu languages so that linguists and other scholars could work on them individually, collectively, and comparatively," said Hyman. "Since we have reconstructions of the original mother language, the idea was that the entries in these dictionaries could be cross-referenced and tagged to the reconstructed forms. This part of the effort has proven to be extraordinarily labor-intensive, but we are still working on this aspect of the project, as well as on more and better dictionaries."
But with the monumental task of expanding the online dictionary and keeping it up-to-date, Hyman and Lowe's team hopes it'll have time to put some of the phrases into practice and to ask for their beers in three different Bantu languages.