Hasil untuk "African languages and literature"

P. Chimbunde, B. Moreeng

Abstract Despite the availability of well-crafted school history curricula in Southern African countries, policy-practice dissonance remains evident, suggesting some factors continue to widen implementation gaps. Employing policy documents and extant literature, this conceptual paper engages Bourdieu’s conceptual triad of practice – capital, habitus, and field – to make a case that employing dominant languages by teachers in history classrooms cultivates epistemic injustice and marginalises the students’ identities, thereby widening rather than narrowing history curriculum implementation gaps. Understanding how linguistic capital, habitus and field impact the history curriculum implementation gaps can provide fundamental insights into how school history teaching can be improved, not only in schools in Southern Africa but across the world where teachers overlook the linguistic resources that students bring to the class. The paper extends the discourse that questions the English hegemony in the implementation of the school history curriculum in countries that are characterised by linguistic diversity. Suggestions are proposed to dismantle English hegemony in the teaching of the school history curriculum, ultimately joining the implementation dots.

Collins Ketere

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is reshaping global communication, education, and cultural expression, yet its current models often reinforce algorithmic biases that marginalize African languages and cultural identities. Rooted in Western epistemologies, many AI systems fail to account for the linguistic diversity and socio-cultural realities of African communities. This paper examines how these biases emerge and how decolonizing strategies—centered on participatory design, ethical data practices, and community-based innovation—can reorient AI toward inclusivity and justice. Drawing on a thematic review of African-led AI initiatives such as Masakhane, Lanfrica, and the Ghana NLP Landscape project, the study explores efforts to build corpora, promote indigenous language processing, and integrate cultural knowledge into machine learning systems. The paper employs a critical literature synthesis and case-based analysis to highlight both the promise and challenges of AI-driven language and culture preservation. Key obstacles include the lack of digitized resources, limited local infrastructure, and continued reliance on Western-dominated datasets. Nevertheless, emerging projects illustrate the transformative potential of AI when developed in collaboration with African linguists, communities, and technologists. These efforts foreground indigenous epistemologies and demonstrate that AI can serve as a tool for cultural resurgence rather than erasure. Ultimately, the paper contributes to ongoing debates about algorithmic fairness, ethical AI design, and the imperative to protect Africa’s linguistic and cultural heritage in the digital age. Keywords: Artificial Intelligence, decolonization, African languages, algorithmic bias, cultural representation, participatory design

J. K. Aina

This study aims to critically review the integration of African Indigenous Knowledge (AIK) into the science curriculum as a strategy to decolonise science education in Africa. Using a literature review method, the paper synthesises insights from 20 peer-reviewed journal articles, three edited book chapters, one bibliography, one conference proceeding, and one public lecture, published between 2018 and 2023. The findings reveal that integrating AIK into science education enhances cultural relevance, increases student engagement, and uncovers the scientific potential historically suppressed by the dominance of Western knowledge systems and language barriers. The paper proposes the Integrated Indigenous Knowledge Science Education (IIKSE) curriculum framework and emphasises the importance of teaching science in African Indigenous languages. This research implies the need for comprehensive teacher training, interdisciplinary curriculum development, and collaborative engagement with Indigenous communities. Such efforts are essential to build an inclusive, sustainable, and contextually meaningful science education system that empowers African students and promotes the recognition of local knowledge systems.

Chuol Gatkuoth Puot

Existing literature rebutting the “African gangs” construct in Australia has mostly been dominated by Western knowledge, with little attention paid to African ways of knowing. This construct harms many Australians marginalized by media-perpetuated preconceived notions. This study aimed to address this gap by incorporating African epistemology and ontology into the discussion based on semi-structured interviews with 13 African Australians. Findings revealed that the term gang is not a recognized word or concept in many African Australian languages. This linguistic disparity can lead to cross-cultural misunderstandings. Young African Australians are vulnerable to exploitation by organized crime groups, who recruit disengaged youth to commit offenses for financial gain, thereby exposing them to debt and violence. Focusing on the “African gangs” narrative conceals young people’s vulnerability to victimization. The findings contribute to a deeper understanding of African Australians and can strengthen the capacity for stakeholders to work jointly to address these problems.

Ernest Udalla

David Ifeoluwa Adelani

Recent advances in word embeddings and language models use large-scale, unlabelled data and self-supervised learning to boost NLP performance. Multilingual models, often trained on web-sourced data like Wikipedia, face challenges: few low-resource languages are included, their data is often noisy, and lack of labeled datasets makes it hard to evaluate performance outside high-resource languages like English. In this dissertation, we focus on languages spoken in Sub-Saharan Africa where all the indigenous languages in this region can be regarded as low-resourced in terms of the availability of labelled data for NLP tasks and unlabelled data found on the web. We analyse the noise in the publicly available corpora, and curate a high-quality corpus, demonstrating that the quality of semantic representations learned in word embeddings does not only depend on the amount of data but on the quality of pre-training data. We demonstrate empirically the limitations of word embeddings, and the opportunities the multilingual pre-trained language model (PLM) offers especially for languages unseen during pre-training and low-resource scenarios. We further study how to adapt and specialize multilingual PLMs to unseen African languages using a small amount of monolingual texts. To address the under-representation of the African languages in NLP research, we developed large scale human-annotated labelled datasets for 21 African languages in two impactful NLP tasks: named entity recognition and machine translation. We conduct an extensive empirical evaluation using state-of-the-art methods across supervised, weakly-supervised, and transfer learning settings.

Kedir Yassin Hussen, Walelign Tewabe Sewunetie, Abinew Ali Ayele et al.

Large Language Models (LLMs) are transforming Natural Language Processing (NLP), but their benefits are largely absent for Africa's 2,000 low-resource languages. This paper comparatively analyzes African language coverage across six LLMs, eight Small Language Models (SLMs), and six Specialized SLMs (SSLMs). The evaluation covers language coverage, training sets, technical limitations, script problems, and language modelling roadmaps. The work identifies 42 supported African languages and 23 available public data sets, and it shows a big gap where four languages (Amharic, Swahili, Afrikaans, and Malagasy) are always treated while there is over 98\% of unsupported African languages. Moreover, the review shows that just Latin, Arabic, and Ge'ez scripts are identified while 20 active scripts are neglected. Some of the primary challenges are lack of data, tokenization biases, computational costs being very high, and evaluation issues. These issues demand language standardization, corpus development by the community, and effective adaptation methods for African languages.

Happy Buzaaba, Alexander Wettig, David Ifeoluwa Adelani et al.

Large language models (LLMs) have achieved impressive results in a wide range of natural language applications. However, they often struggle to recognize low-resource languages, in particular African languages, which are not well represented in large training corpora. In this paper, we consider how to adapt LLMs to low-resource African languages. We find that combining curated data from African languages with high-quality English educational texts results in a training mix that substantially improves the model's performance on these languages. On the challenging IrokoBench dataset, our models consistently achieve the best performance amongst similarly sized baselines, particularly on knowledge-intensive multiple-choice questions (AfriMMLU). Additionally, on the cross-lingual question answering benchmark AfriQA, our models outperform the base model by over 10%. To better understand the role of English data during training, we translate a subset of 200M tokens into Swahili language and perform an analysis which reveals that the content of these data is primarily responsible for the strong performance. We release our models and data to encourage future research on African languages.

Sheriff Issaka, Keyi Wang, Yinka Ajibola et al.

Despite representing nearly one-third of the world's languages, African languages remain critically underserved by modern NLP technologies, with 88\% classified as severely underrepresented or completely ignored in computational linguistics. We present the African Languages Lab (All Lab), a comprehensive research initiative that addresses this technological gap through systematic data collection, model development, and capacity building. Our contributions include: (1) a quality-controlled data collection pipeline, yielding the largest validated African multi-modal speech and text dataset spanning 40 languages with 19 billion tokens of monolingual text and 12,628 hours of aligned speech data; (2) extensive experimental validation demonstrating that our dataset, combined with fine-tuning, achieves substantial improvements over baseline models, averaging +23.69 ChrF++, +0.33 COMET, and +15.34 BLEU points across 31 evaluated languages; and (3) a structured research program that has successfully mentored fifteen early-career researchers, establishing sustainable local capacity. Our comparative evaluation against Google Translate reveals competitive performance in several languages while identifying areas that require continued development.

Lucas C. Cordeiro, Matthew L. Daggitt, Julien Girard-Satabin et al.

Neural network verification is a new and rapidly developing field of research. So far, the main priority has been establishing efficient verification algorithms and tools, while proper support from the programming language perspective has been considered secondary or unimportant. Yet, there is mounting evidence that insights from the programming language community may make a difference in the future development of this domain. In this paper, we formulate neural network verification challenges as programming language challenges and suggest possible future solutions.

Matefu L. Mabela, Thabo Ditsele

Language represents an individual’s identity in many respects. It is a natural ability of any average person that they use to express thoughts and ideas, investigate their traditions and experiences, and better their community and the laws that govern it. The ability to choose the official language was acknowledged in the Bill of Rights, and the Constitution acknowledges that indigenous languages are a commodity which has not been fully used. By studying the difficulties of intellectualising indigenous languages in modern South Africa, this research aims to promote the usage and enhance the prestige of indigenous languages. The challenge in basic education in South Africa is that South African indigenous languages are not prioritised. Moreover, there appears to be a disconnection between language policy and implementation.Contribution: A document analysis was undertaken to review literature on the possibility of intellectualising South African indigenous languages by considering various theories and methods of terminology development, including interborrowing within South African indigenous languages and adaptation of some English and Afrikaans words as already entrenched languages in education.

M. R. Emsley, M. A. Modiba

This paper explores the empirical, real, and actual trajectories in South African universities regarding multilingualism and decolonisation. It employs the critical realist approach to uncover these trajectories through reviewed literature. It investigates whether the policy is followed in implementing African indigenous languages (AILs) against the hegemony of English and Afrikaans in South African universities. The paper found that multilingualism is still an area that requires attention, even though ample legislation and policies were drafted to necessitate decolonised practices that foster it. This paper argues that the notion of decolonisation and the use of multilingualism can be placed at the centre of curriculum transformation. However, the paper again argues that actual events like a disconnect between basic and higher education systems, digitalisation, intellectualisation of African languages and confidence of the African language users in the academia can hinder multilingualism. African learners come to universities with unique African language repertoires, but English is still mostly used as a medium of instruction in most South African universities. This paper makes recommendations that can rescue the situation, some of them which are funding African languages digitalisation, awarding African languages research outputs, and widely conducting studies on the African students and academics’ perceptions on multilingual education.

Connie Makgabo, G. Quintero

Folkloric studies have accelerated in the Philippines and South Africa because the Academe acknowledged the urgency to collect, preserve, and publish the oral traditions of indigenous communities. Oral traditions embody the history, values, and world views of these indigenous cultures, which need to be preserved for posterity. This paper discusses the relevance, gains, and challenges in conducting folklore research in the Philippines and South Africa, which share similarities, including their colonial pasts and number of indigenous communities. The paper contemplates the relevance of folklore research outputs in different fields thereby contributing to the discourse on the value of folklore research. This qualitative study uses textual analysis to focus on insights related to folklore research, using secondary data including journal articles, book publications, and textual references. The study reveals that although there is extensive research in the field of folklore in both countries, there remain gaps that need to be filled, such as the collection, preservation, and recognition of representative folklore from other regions and cultural communities. South Africa, for instance, has 12 official languages, and the Philippines has 110 ethnolinguistic groups. There are still languages and indigenous oral traditions that are developing, and folk literature that needs to be recorded, preserved, and published. These oral traditions/folk literature play an important role in revealing people’s cultural identities and preserving heritage, which is imperative in nation-building. The findings highlight the importance of continuing research about folklore and the need to preserve indigenous knowledge systems When written down and published, folklore becomes tangible and preserved for posterity, providing present and future generations the opportunity to learn, understand, and appreciate their cultural legacy.

Adria Fuluge

Wahusika katika kazi za fasihi huumbwa kwa ustadi mkubwa kwa lengo la kubeba tafakuri na fikra za mtunzi kuhusu maisha ya jamii. Katika uumbaji huo, aghalabu, binadamu husawiriwa kama kiumbe anayeteseka na anayeishi katika ulimwengu usiomjali, aliyezungukwa na mateso na ubwege[1], na anayeshindwa kukabiliana vyema na uhalisia wake (Wamitila, 2002). Mambo hayo, ndiyo huweza kusababisha afanye maamuzi fulani kama vile kujiua. Hivi ndivyo anavyofanya Euphrase Kezilahabi katika riwaya ya Kichwamaji (1974) anapomuumba mhusika anayejiua. Hata hivyo, kwa kuwa kujiua huambatana na viashiria mbalimbali, makala haya yanajadili viashiria vya kujiua kwa mhusika mkuu katika riwaya teule tu. Riwaya hiyo imeteuliwa kwa sababu ina mawanda ya kutosha yaliyowezesha kupata data zilizolengwa katika makala haya. Pia, riwaya hiyo imeteuliwa kama sampuli ya kuwakilisha riwaya nyingine zenye viashiria vya kujiua. Misingi ya Nadharia ya Udhanaishi imetumika katika uchunguzi, uchanganuzi na uwasilishaji wa matokeo. Data zilikusanywa kwa kutumia mbinu ya uchambuzi wa matini. Mjadala umebainisha kwamba katika riwaya ya Kichwamaji vipo viashiria vinne vya kujiua vilivyomkumba Kazimoto kabla ya kujiua kwake. Viashiria hivyo ni kukata tamaa, kujitenga kijamii, kuzungumzia masuala ya kujiua na mabadiliko ya tabia. Makala yanahitimisha kwamba jamii inahitaji kupewa elimu ya kutosha kuhusu kujiua kwa wahusika pamoja na viashiria vyake ili iweze kumtambua na kumsaidia mtu mwenye viashiria vya kujiua.   [1]Mtazamo wa kidhanaishi unaopinga kuwepo kwa maana na ufahamu katika maisha ya binadamu, kutokana na kukata tamaa na kukosa tumaini la kuishi. Kwa mujibu wa Esslin (2001), ubwege ni hali ya kukosa nia ya kufanya jambo fulani na kutengwa katika imani za kidini, tabia za kiungu na mizizi ya akili na mawazo ya mtu. Hii ina maana kwamba ubwege ni kitendo cha kudadisi hali ya binadamu ya kuendelea kuishi ilhali maisha hayana maana tena.

Victor Umaru

This study discusses The Pedagogical Significance of Biblical Languages in African Theological Education, focusing on the declining proficiency in biblical languages such as Hebrew and Greek within African theological institutions, using the Baptist College of Theology, Obinze. The problem identified was the increasing marginalisation of these languages, often substituted by more practical or contemporary subjects, resulting in a weakening of biblical exegesis and diminished theological depth in academic and pastoral contexts. The study’s primary objective was to assess biblical languages’ role in enhancing theological education, particularly in African contexts. It investigated how mastery of Hebrew and Greek could significantly improve scriptural interpretation, homiletics, and doctrinal accuracy among African theologians and pastors. The research aimed to demonstrate that proficiency in these languages offers essential insights into the original meaning of biblical texts and a greater connection to their cultural and historical contexts. Methodologically, the study employed discourse analysis and case studies, examining curricula from various African theological institutions and surveying educators and students. It also reviewed theological literature to evaluate biblical languages’ historical and contemporary significance in Christian education. The findings revealed that institutions prioritising biblical language instruction produce graduates with more vital exegetical skills, better equipped for accurate scriptural interpretation and culturally sensitive theological reflection. Based on these findings, the study recommends that African theological institutions reinstate the teaching of biblical languages as a core part of their curricula. These recommendations include creating more accessible language courses, integrating digital learning tools, and emphasising biblical language proficiency’s long-term academic and pastoral benefits. The study advocates for a balanced approach to theological education incorporating biblical languages as a vital component of developing sound theological scholarship and effective ministry in Africa.

Dr. Ben-Fred Ohia

critical examination of African literature will show that Africa before the advent of Europeans in Africa had two types of literature namely: oral literature and literature written in the indigenous languages. African literature raises the question of defining African literature geographically, racially or culturally and any impingement on any of these is vehemently opposed by African writers in their works: protest novel, protest drama and protest poetry alike. The main purpose of this paper is to explore and establish the idea of “protest” as aspect of the African fiction (novel) as espoused in Achebe’s Anthills of the Savannah. This paper adopts ecocriticism and qualitative method. It looks into elements of protest in the chosen text; in reflection to the African fiction and literature generally. It is the findings of this paper that protest in African literature results from the fight for decolonisation and a struggle against intimidation, dehumanisation, degredation of the environment through colonialism and neocolonialism. This paper concludes that this commitment of African literary writers has made African fiction a protest literature, especially as seen in Achebe’s Anthills of the Savannah.

Jessica Ojo, Kelechi Ogueji

Recent advancements in Natural Language Processing (NLP) has led to the proliferation of large pretrained language models. These models have been shown to yield good performance, using in-context learning, even on unseen tasks and languages. They have also been exposed as commercial APIs as a form of language-model-as-a-service, with great adoption. However, their performance on African languages is largely unknown. We present a preliminary analysis of commercial large language models on two tasks (machine translation and text classification) across eight African languages, spanning different language families and geographical areas. Our results suggest that commercial language models produce below-par performance on African languages. We also find that they perform better on text classification than machine translation. In general, our findings present a call-to-action to ensure African languages are well represented in commercial large language models, given their growing popularity.

Saurav K. Aryal, Howard Prioleau, Surakshya Aryal

Sentiment analysis is a fundamental and valuable task in NLP. However, due to limitations in data and technological availability, research into sentiment analysis of African languages has been fragmented and lacking. With the recent release of the AfriSenti-SemEval Shared Task 12, hosted as a part of The 17th International Workshop on Semantic Evaluation, an annotated sentiment analysis of 14 African languages was made available. We benchmarked and compared current state-of-art transformer models across 12 languages and compared the performance of training one-model-per-language versus single-model-all-languages. We also evaluated the performance of standard multilingual models and their ability to learn and transfer cross-lingual representation from non-African to African languages. Our results show that despite work in low resource modeling, more data still produces better models on a per-language basis. Models explicitly developed for African languages outperform other models on all tasks. Additionally, no one-model-fits-all solution exists for a per-language evaluation of the models evaluated. Moreover, for some languages with a smaller sample size, a larger multilingual model may perform better than a dedicated per-language model for sentiment classification.

P. Alex

This paper explores the drama written in indigenous African languages across many countries in Africa. It highlights the intellectual snobbery suffered by drama written in indigenous languages, probing the reasons behind the critical marginalization. It equally probes the elemental compositions of drama written in indigenous languages, investigating how oral elements revitalize and fertilize the dramatic works. The theoretical framework for this study was anchored on Ethnodramatics, a theory of indigenous drama projected by Affiah and Osuagwu while the inspirations which substantiate indigenous African languages as viable and effective linguistic mediums for dramatic creativity are derived from Ngugi wa Thiongo’s theoretical postulation on the language of African theatre in Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature (1986). The paper reveals that traditional African drama in indigenous languages creatively utilizes oral resources and elements such as proverbs, riddles, mime, music, songs, dance, and other folk arts in ways that embellish and relive their drama. The paper concludes that by writing in indigenous languages, playwrights expand the resources and frontiers of African indigenous languages, a situation that nurtures and preserves them.

Philip Etyang, J. S. Makokha, Oluoch Obura

The Picaresque tradition is a mode of writing that began in Spain in the 16th century and flourished in the 17th and 18th centuries throughout the rest of Europe. It is a literary tradition that has continued to influence modern fiction writing to date. The current paper examined the picaresque and popular African literature narrative techniques through conducting an in-depth analysis of the following texts; Kill Me Quick, Mission to Kala, The Angels Die, and A Sport of Nature. To effectively address the task, the study examined narratives and narrative techniques in the prose fiction under study. The paper then deployed the Structural Literary Theory in an effort to decode the intertextuality between the texts. The study established that the texts under study are interconnected through the main characters, especially the picaro/picara. An examination of Gustav Freytag’s narrative structure was conducted and similarities and differences in the narrative structures of the texts under study was observed. The Postcolonial Literary Theory was also consulted where specific strands of the theory as propounded by Vorn Gorp, and Frantz Fanon were blended to furnish the study with the necessary theoretical backbone to exhaustively study picaresque narratives in popular literature. In conclusion, the study established that the Picaresque and Popular Literature writing modes are interconnected through the use plot and main characters. The study also established that the non-linear and episodic plot structures are the most commonly used techniques in picaresque and popular writing modes.