Language resources and tools in Southern Africa 11

The present contribution reports on selected developments in language documentation in West Africa, in particular on general and region-specific documentation criteria, and on specific initiatives in the area. 1. Language Documentation The present brief overview is based principally on the following selective criteria: 1. The widely accepted distinction between language documentation and language description introduced by Nikolaus Himmelmann (Himmelmann 1998). 2. The portability criteria put forward by Bird and Simons (Bird & Simons 2002). 3. The WELD (Wordable Efficient Language Documentation) criteria for language documentation (Gibbon 2002). This means, essentially, that linguistic work which is either mainly theoretical or descriptive, or idiosyncratic, or based on proprietary or non-open-source software are considered peripheral. A great deal of linguistic work on West African languages is, of course, available, and indeed has more than once proved to be pioneering and paradigm-determining, as with the developments in Prosodic Phonology, from Firth to the Autosegmental Phonology initiated by Leben, Goldsmith and others. However, these developments are outside the scope of language documentation itself, which is a scientific discipline in its own right, closely related to Text Technology, and also the provider of high quality empirical resources for linguistic description, in the form of text and speech data, lexica, grammars and software tools for acquisition, annotation, archiving, dissemination, retrieval and data mining. The WELD criteria, which were developed in close consultation with colleagues at universities in Ivory Coast and Nigeria, outline a charter for language documentation with specific reference to endangered languages, and specifies that language documentation should be: 1. Comprehensive: In principle this means that language documentation must apply to all languages. But economy is a component of efficiency, and priorities must be set which may be hard to justify in social or political terms: if a language is more similar to a well-documented language than another language is, then the priority must be with the second. 2. Efficient: Simple, workable, efficient and inexpensive enabling technologies must be developed, and new applications for existing technologies created, which will empower local academic communities to multiply the human resources available for the task. A model of this kind of development is provided by the Simputer ("Simple Computer") handheld Community Digital Assistant (CDA) enterprise of the "Bangalore Seven" in India (see http://www.simputer.org/), which could be incorporated into conventional European and US project funding schemes. 3. State-of-the-art: In addition to using modern data exchange formats and compatibility enhancing archiving technologies such as XML and schema languages, efficient language documentation requires the deployment of state of the art techniques of from computational linguistics, human language technologies and artificial intelligence, for instance by the use of automatic classification techniques for part of speech tagging and other kinds of annotation, and of machine learning techniques for lexicon construction and grammar induction. The SIL organisation, for example, has a long history of application of advanced computational linguistic methodologies (see www.sil.org), but more advanced techniques are available, and more research is needed. 4. Affordable: In order to achieve a multiplier effect, and at the same time benefit education, research and development world-wide, local conditions must be taken into account. Traditional colonial policies of presenting “white elephants” to local communities, which must be expensively cared for and then rapidly become dysfunctional, must be replaced by less expensive methods – for instance it is expensive or impossible to download a large, modern software package because of slow networks, and electricity outages and landline interruptions). Net-based software registration and updating is very costly, as is wireless data transfer. However, in some areas modern techniques such as ADSL are becoming available. 5. Fair: If a language community shares its most valuable human commodity, its language, with the rest of the world, then the human language engineering and computational linguistic communities must do likewise, and provide open source software (also to reap the other wellknown potential benefits of open source software such as transparency and reliability). The Simputer Public Licence for hardware and the Gnu Public Licence for software are useful models. The development and deployment of proprietary software (and hardware for that matter) and closed websites in this topic domain