The African Language Solutions Blog

In an interesting development in South African politics, The Inkatha Freedom Party (IFP) has called on the Minister of Basic Education to make African languages compulsory in schools rather than pushing foreign ones such as Mandarin. “This begs a question of whether schools in China will teach IsiZulu or other African languages, as the Minister…

A leading mobile reading platform says that young Africans have increasingly taken up reading on mobile devices. Could this spell a translation boom? Through its mobile application, Worldreader, a not-for-profit organisation, allows people in low income countries to access books and stories through mobile phones.  Started in 2010, it also hands out e-readers and e-books…

Uganda has been named the best English Speaking African Country in a study conducted by World Linguistic Agency. The study names Uganda as the best with Zambia and South Africa close behind. The study also sees Nigerians being credited for taking the spot for constructing good sentences that are grammatically flawless. The full list is…

In the last few months, the ebola outbreak in Africa has escalated into a possible global threat. On the continent, a lot of misconceptions still exist about how to prevent the disease. Critics claim the lack of available information in the languages spoken in areas where the disease has spread is largely to blame for…

This September, a new Xhosa-English dictionary was published by the Oxford University Press Southern Africa. The Xhosa word for ‘condom’ made it along with other new words adapted from modern language. In their article on The Times Live, Aphiwe de Klerk and Philani Nombembe state that after three years of research, the new Xhosa-English dictionary…

The Ghanian Minister for Education has stated schools should turn to Ghana’s local languages as the language of instruction in the country’s primary schools. Her opinion is backed up by the head of the  Department of Linguistics at the University of Ghana, who blames social media on the bad school results of the Ghanian youth….

Alarming news from the BBC! No matter how great economic success might sound,  new research has found it severely influences the languages spoken in a country. According to an article written by Rebecca Morelle, new research published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B revealed that in the most developed regions of the world,…

Good news for Hausa speakers – the BBC has announced that they will start to broadcast a news programme in the West African  language. The programme will take the form of 10-minute weekday bulletins. This will be the first time anywhere that an international broadcaster is going to air in the language. Hausa is spoken…

Next year, close to 4,000 schools in South Africa will start African language classes in grade 1. This decision has been made based on a pilot project that ran in schools this year. In South Africa, the Department of Basic Education’s Incremental Introduction of African Languages (IIAL) has recently announced an interesting new programme that…

Nigeria is booming!  The future looks bright and we at African Language Solutions predict the demand for language localization and translation into and out of Nigerian languages is going to boom too! As the caring, sharing type we thought we would invest some time in producing a report on the language landscape of Nigeria. With…