We are in the
technological era and the use of ICT is not news any more. Even in the
remote areas of Africa, we find someone using at least a mobile
phone. It has been argued that even smart phones are becoming more popular in villages.
This is good news, but not everyone is enjoying this to the maximum.
Let's face the reality, a larger section of villagers are not
enjoying the services that we all enjoy: blogs, social media
(WhatsApp, Twitter, Tumblr, Facebook, Skype, etc), you name them.
Most of them just know how to make and answer calls. A few more are
able to read and compose text messages, otherwise I have seen many
more that do not even know what to do when text messages come on
their phones.
I have always argued in
various forums that in order to remove this language barrier,
software localization is one of the best alternatives to make
ICT appropriate to a target population. Localization of software
involves adapting technologies to the linguistic, cultural and
technical requirements of a target group of people. However if not
handled carefully, software localization cannot achieve its intended
purposes. One of the problems that native speakers find is to manage
the influx of new terminologies that are begging their way into the
language vocabulary. Generally, most people do not mind much about
that as far as they communicate. But language regulatory bodies and
linguists always have great concerns over the unsupervised growth
of terminologies.
Somehow, leaving the
terminologies to grow by themselves is very dangerous. Since a lot of
terminologies that come in are loaned, they pose a lot of threat to
the linguistic and phonological structures of the target language.
For example, in Chichewa, the term banki is borrowed from the
English word bank. The plural is banki or mabanki, and it is not clear yet which is
the correct form. Regular users may not necessarily think that
this is an issue, but for linguists it poses a lot of problems and
inconsistencies in trying to grammatically categorise words like
these. You may also wish to recall that Chichewa nouns affect
sentence structure because they determine the right argument markers
(called agwirizanitsi in
Chichewa) to associate with. In Chichewa noun system, the noun
banki belongs to class 9. Generally, class 9 plurals are in
class 10. Thus, banki (sing. Class 9) => banki (pl. class 10)
makes sense, while banki (sing. Class 9) => mabanki (pl. class
2/class 6) does not, yet it is the mostly used plural form.
Compare the markers in the following two sentences: Banki zina
zinatsegulidwa kale koma zilibe
anthu ambiri. and Mabanaki ena
anatsegulidwa kale koma alibe
anthu ambiri. Both mean the same: "Some banks were opened long ago but they do not have a lot of customers") This is the case with other loanwords like ofesi
(office), kapu (cup) et cetera.
(For those that do not understand this number-based noun classification
system: the word banki sounds to nicely belong to I-Zi
class, but using mabanki creates a new classification, I-Ma,
which is ungrammatical; just as pluralizations nkhuku =>
mankhuku and nyanja => manyanja can sound very
awkward).
The worst case scenario
is where the language becomes completely immersed into another
language. Look at this Chichewa sentence in youth slang: Ndatrapa
ngini ija magaye. Panopa ndikudona pa nide, titchekana boboo thayimu
ina yake. Chichewa is just 38% (5/13 --- ija, panopa, pa, ina,
yake). The rest is Chinglish: Chichewalised English. If we
juxtapose it with an equivalent English sentence, it can be seen that
this phrase is “skin-to-skin transliteratable” (forget about
semantics here): I have trapped that thing, guys. I am downing to
my den. We will check each other some time. So little by little
English is eating away our language and if anything cannot done as
soon as possible, we will lose out our beautiful language. Of course,
I have a problem with youth slang. I have always argued elsewhere that it is volatile and unpredictable. As such, we cannot
rely on it very much though we cannot deny the fact that it is
influencing Chichewa language in general.
Linguists tell us that
language (just like any cultural element) is dynamic. We take English
as an example: In 1500-1600s, no one raised eyebrows if you spoke
like this: I hath purposed to come unto thee, but was let
hitherto. In this statement let means to prevent from.
But you can agree with me that the word let now means allow
as depicted in this phrase: Please let me go. This is exactly
opposite to the original meaning . Similarly, the word gay
does not carry the same meaning it used to carry some few years ago,
because it is now more associated with sex orientation and not
necessarily excitement. Chichewa has also changed overtime.
For example, Chichewa that is in the widely used bible version, Buku
Lopatulika ndilo Mawu a Mulungu, was translated by William
Percival Johnson in 1912 and ever since it has not been modified. (By
this, I am not referring to these parallel translations/versions:
Malembo Woyera or Buku Loyera). There are some
grammatical and semantical errors but Bible Society of Malawi is
afraid to correct them (I don't know why). Leaving that aside, 1912
Chichewa is not the same as 2012 Chichewa. Exactly 100 years have
passed and there are a lot of things that have changed about Chichewa
language. For example, 1 Timothy 3:6 is translated as Asakhale
wophunza. Wophunza means novice, but it took me time
(and age) to grasp its meaning and understand that wophunza is
the root for wophunzira (student). Nowadays, a better
translation would be Asakhale wongobadwa mwatsopano (i.e. He must not be a new convert). In
addition, in those days a town was called mudzi but
today we know it as tawuni, and indeed tawuni is not
mudzi (village).
Given another 100 years or so, Pure Chichewa will not be the same.
The whole issue of localization comes to a bottleneck because there seem to be a tag of war between developers of new terminologies and users of such terminologies. Terminologists are fast developing new terminologies when the users are not ready or willing to use them. In languages of business, terminologies easily flow in. But that leaves other languages with the task of generating new terminologies or risk dilution. However, localization when viewed from a positive angle, it is a way of preserving a language. It is well-known that languages from the West are mostly associated with economic influence and are little by little subduing other indigenous languages.
In this technological era, every language that wants to survive has to move with fashion. English is fast adapting. Words like mouse, server, breadcrumbs, web do not have same meanings as they used to before 1960s. Similarly, words like blog, facebook (verb), google (verb), tweet (verb) have just born now with the invention of technology. So what is all this noise I am trying to make? We still need translation for our languages to survive and also for the larger section of Malawians that do not understand English. But we need to adjust with time. The language should retain its originality without imposing unnecessary rigour to contemporary readers/writers.
My personal take is that borrowing is excessive when you start replacing existing native terms.
ReplyDeleteThe official vs grassroots problem is interestingly complex and to a large extent language-specific I think. Official bodies in underfunded languages tend to be slow and reactive, rather than proactive. In the case of Gaelic, it has been pretty much a 1-2 person effort to streamline the (existing) confusion of terms (like half a dozen words for "import") and thrash out the rest. By now, it's becoming the de-facto "standard" (bearing in mind the problem of uptake in such a tiny language).
I think in a language like Chichewa the "total" grassroots approach has a much better chance, at least if you can get enough people talking about technology in your language. Amongst a million people, someone WILL think of a really great word for "addon", so it's then just a question of picking up on it and codifying.
Identifying such words is tricky of course. But you could use web tools to map the use of terminology - we have a tool to do the reverse, in a way but I guess you could use it to identify specific words. I'm not making much sense; but if you go to www.faclair.com and enter a word, for example "gille" and then click on the blue underlined word, you get a Google map which displays users who know and use a word. In our case, we're trying to determine which lexical items are actually still in use and which are obsolete (we have the problem of too many people using old dictionaries). But you could use something like that to map use of technical terminology, no?