The Kamusi Project has just tossed their hat in to the ring of folks who are working to get African languages adapted to 21st century technology terminology. They made the official announcement about a site they've set up to try and further the goals of getting Swahili words adapted to computers. I mean, after all, according to Google Translate, 'computer' in Swahili is 'kompyuta' which for some reason I don't really buy as being a terribly Swahili word.

This frustration is further belied by Rebecca in a recent tweet:

Just done an interview abt @iHubNairobi with #BBCSwahili; I need to practice Swahili more....whats a domain in Swahili? More research needed

Again, according to Google Translate, 'domain' (as in web domain name) is 'miliki', which does sound like a proper Swahili word, but I'm assuming it has a completely different meaning probably having to do with rule of land or something. And that's the issue, do you adopt some "3rd party" loan word for these purposes or do you come up with a new word because let's face it, no one is probably going to call the 'web', 'mtandao' as it's just too long and everyone knows the word web now.

Let me emphasize that this doesn't just affect African languages. The problem exists everywhere which is why a word like 'web' is just 'web' in Spanish despite there officially being no 'w' in the alphabet. It's also why Speakers of Croatian will say SAD instead of Sjedinjene Američke Države for the United States of America due to the length.

I suppose that in the end there needs to be a balance of ease with authenticity when it comes to adding new words to a language. I just hope that efforts like the ones from Kamusi and ANLoc (site appears to be down?) gain some traction because it's a problem that isn't going to go away and will only get worse as time goes on. Just look at German, which currently has 8,000 loan words from English. At what point is your language (and thusly, your identity) no longer yours?

For those unfamiliar with it, The Daily WTF is a collection of ridiculous stories from technology. It has a decidedly geeky focus though, and at times, they mention a joke in some programming language that even leaves me scratching my head. But, there is an overarching theme to a great many of the articles that come through in that some geek recounts how he was hired to rehash some system, somewhere that someone cobbled together with something that somewhat worked.

While good for a laugh, it belies the fact that a lot of organizations simply do not have the budget to hire a tech or web person (at least prior to this global economic crisis anyways.) This in turn means that someone who is probably happier taking photographs or coordinating reports becomes the de facto in-house tech person and is forced to make a great number of decisions that aren't necessarily beneficial to the organization short of helping some goal limp to its finish. Then, somewhere down the line, someone stands back, shakes their head, and says, "Holy hell, this needs some advising from someone with the word 'technology' in their title."

I'm assuming that there is something of a similar backstory to this and is the reason that Tobias at Kabissa posted an open discussion about web solutions in Africa. It's a good thread, which most likely due to the tragedy in Haiti hasn't been seen by a lot of folks due to the work going on amidst the destruction there and the work that needs doing.

I just wanted to point it out as there have been a great variety of items submitted to the discussion. I wrote a lengthy chunk that I actually want to work over a bit and post here as I left out Google Sites as an option and a number of things could be refined.

Overall though, people were suggesting a great many of the CMS solutions that exist for free and for an organization with a limited budget present fantastic opportunities to leave behind whatever set of static HTML pages 27 people had added to over the last 10 years. More input is needed though and as Tobias pointed out after a number of posts had come through, there should be more of a focus on finding whatever most approximates a silver bullet insofar as a solution goes. Naturally this varies a great deal given the environment and focus of the organization, but still there are a number of different options that are all good, but most of us showed up to the discussion ready to ride our favorite bicycle, which probably hasn't helped the organization in deciding on what they should go with. I suppose it's because ultimately there is no perfect solution and so, the discussion needs more discussing.

When it comes to web technology trends, there is typically one that is the sexiest one for that year. For example, "mobile" was the one for 2009.

I'm going to go out on what I feel to be a rather thick limb and say that 2010 is going to be the year of language. We've been seeing multi-lingual efforts grow by leaps and bounds over the past years and it seems that we're getting to a point where most people I know say, "Hey, Google Translate doesn't just simply translate literally, but it's actually quite good." The web has matured in the possibilities it allows in being able to cross the borders formed by language.

Nowhere is this more the case than in Africa. I see 2010 as a pivotal year in African languages getting online. Jimmy Wales wants more African languages in Wikipedia and there has been a good deal of push by Google in this department with their Kiswahili Wikipedia Challenge that the Google Africa blog covered two weeks after it was over--how timely. But, the fact is that while all kinds of money and effort can be tossed at getting more African languages in to a digital format, if it doesn't come from Africans, it's not going to take root.

While a great many African languages were alphabetized in to Latin character sets a century ago by missionaries, it's unfortunate to see that despite this, so many languages, while spoken, as not able to be read or written (Kiswahili and a handful of others are indeed working to buck this trend.) I would posit that while these alphabets exist, for the most part, they weren't created by those speaking the languages from birth. They were an artificial, external force that didn't stay around.

By comparison, a bit before the time that missionaries were traipsing about Africa, putting these historically oral languages to text, the Romantics in Europe were busy standardizing their languages. Pompeu Fabra, Vuk Karadžić, Ferenc Kazinczy, Alessandro Manzoni, and a slew of others were refining the languages that they had grown up with. But, instead of formalizing their languages in order to spread religion, they were doing so in order to spread the language.

It needs to be said that Amharic and other languages in Africa did indeed have established alphabets, but compatriots of these European Romantics were busily trouncing African languages through Colonialism. While enforcing English, French, Portuguese, and Spanish as lingua francas may have been practical (yet brashly inhumane) in the artificially created borders of a colony that may have had upwards of 100 or more languages and dialects, it set up a system that we still see in place today. This is especially in Anglophone or Francophone African countries where the local languages are spoken on familiar, yet not official terms. There have been strides made to try and stem this linguistic undertow of the last century as seen in Tanzania, Mali, and others, where education in the local languages is either being proudly enforced or at least investigated.

The problem in all of this is that spreading a language in an official capacity is expensive and English has (like it or not) become the business language of the world. Dictionaries are not cheap to print and institutions are not set up overnight, let alone the fact that you need people able to read and write in these languages in the first place who are in constantly dwindling numbers. Taking on the creation of language institutions for an entire country to function are not easy to propose, especially if there are several languages to consider.

So enters the internet and more importantly, the point where we are at with language on the web in 2010. Wikipedia, Google, Facebook, Twitter, and others (such as this site) are all taking the fact seriously that any 21st century web business model now needs to include a multi-lingual environment to reach the maximum number of users.

Kiswahili has been the golden child in all of this, making use of many of these crowd-sourced technologies to bolster its online presence. While Google is trying to promote competitions, these linguistic efforts can be self-started and homegrown. In fact, to truly succeed, I think that they have to be, as people need to convince themselves first and everyone else second. Of course, many people will very well be asking, why bother?

Google doesn't need to destroy all the data it can't index because it's going to reach a point where if it isn't online, then it will disappear from our collective knowledge. We're at a pretty crucial tipping point where all the languages that are going to be carried forward with us need to get online now, or they will simply cease to exist due to the original speakers dying off or a language like English or French supplanting them. While a monolingual culture may seem easier for people, the fact of the matter is that your identity is tied up in your language and if you lose your language, you lose your culture. The global corporations would love for us all to have the same language and buying habits, but I'm of the opinion that losing the languages and cultures which define us, we basically lose us.

So, let's keep the languages jumping as this new decade takes on the digital preservation of all our languages.

While El Dorado is something for storybooks and popular mythology, I know the actuality of it all too well having grown up in California with Gold Rush history all around me as a child (my home town is called, 'gold town'.) Much is made about the wealth that flowed through Northern California during the mid-19th century, but rarely is the dirtiness of that period ever covered with people working in terrible conditions, catching all manner of diseases, often dying, and all to have the actual wealth go to an elite few with the connections. We've repeated this story in a number of ways over the past 150 years...

I mention this because of the title of this article, L’Afrique, nouvel eldorado des télécommunications (Africa, the new El Dorado of Telecommunication.) The article talks a great deal about the developments in the industry and the growth, but doesn't actually follow up on what is a very catchy title in that while the mobile phone growth in Sub-Saharan Africa is tremendous, it's illusory at best. This growth is being painted in such a good light at the moment, because a great many worldwide companies see a gigantic market there. This is definitely true, but what happens when the growth slows down? Yeah, I know, the slow down is years and years away given that there are a billion people there, but still, it's not as far away as you may think.

At best, a great deal of the adoption is coming about because service, coverage, and prices are sub-par. I think that everyone I've ever met in Sub-Saharan Africa has two if not more phones. One is for talking. One is for texting. Maybe one is for another region if they go there often. This isn't growth, it's people dealing with less than adequate service. Up until about 10 years ago, people in a lot of the US had to do the same as the coverage just wasn't "there" yet. And 150 years ago, miners in California bought multiple claims for when their current one ran out. You hedge you bets and when that translates to numbers, it looks impressive. But, you probably own more than one pair of shoes and always need new ones. You're really only wearing one at a time, so is there really huge possible growth in the shoe industry? Nope.

Yes, there is innovation, like this MTN address book function that Elia tipped me off to and is quite cool. But, I've seen this type of thing before. It was in the 1990's in the US and Europe. Innovation in mobile technology was awesome then. Every couple of months, something groundbreaking would come out from a network provider (not a handset maker mind you) and then they'd all flock to copy it. It was a wondrous time to play with mobile technology, but it's gone as flat as the growth rates in these regions.

I'm just saying that El Dorado was never found. The gold mines of Northern California dried up. A lot of things have happened along the way, but the one thing we know is that growth rates are finite. What happens when the growth flattens out or once numerous networks have swallowed each other? There's conflict in Eastern Congo for the materials that are fueling all this growth. What about that? What if the exports were to stop as they're systematically inhumane?

I know that a lot of my fellow tech bloggers will point to all that's coming about because of the mobile penetration and that the mobile phone is the computer in Africa (although my African friends with computers might disagree), but there is a day very soon where things will flatline and a lot of folks will be left in the lurch. Competition will dry up. Innovation will fall off. Prices will go up and then what?

Instead of constantly talking about growth (especially as if it's going to go on forever), maybe we should be paying a great deal more attention to what's happening at the top and on the sides of this new El Technorado and see that it really isn't all that it's being purported to be. Only then we can maybe talk about what's sustainable in the industry.

I was recently contacted by a former acquaintance who was working to deliver a digital outreach setup to an African company. At the core of this package there will be some kind of Facebook presence, a Twitter account, and a website built around WordPress.

This is a pretty solid setup, but is it the best for the circumstances of that particular company? Is it just that those who teach others to use these systems do so because they are familiar or because actually they function better than anything else, in every environment, in every corner of the world? For example, if language is an issue, how do you deal with that? Obviously when it comes to Facebook and Twitter, there aren't that many alternatives as they're both relatively new and emerging methods of communication. But what about blogging? It's a pretty mature medium (officially been with us for a decade now) with various free platforms such as: Blogger, Posterous, Tumblr, Typepad, and Textpattern as possible alternatives to WordPress to name a few.

I ask these questions because I see that it's often the case we recommend for people to use what it is that we're familiar and comfortable with rather than what best fits the situation. It's not to imply that someone should have a lesser product to use, but they should instead have the one that will best fit their needs and promote their online presence the best. We're so used to saying, "Oh yeah, use this, that, and the other thing" instead of really looking at the need case. We only see that someone may not have much activity online and immediately think that they need what we discern to be the best before maybe letting them play around with things. Because they maybe want to be advanced in what they do, typing up their own HTML, or maybe they want to keep things very simple and just sms or email in an article.

This is one good outgrowth of the "free model" in the web in that we can test out a lot of different systems before deciding which one is best and that decision needs to be a great deal more in the hands of the end user. Thoughts?