South African indigenous languages are among those at risk of a serious decline due to the increasing use of digital technologies. By some estimates only 5% of the world’s languages are likely to survive online.
, it is just the start. What must then follow is teaching students how to use indigenous language to come up with new ways of thinking about their disciplines, drawing on the indigenous knowledge systems that the languages are rooted in.Our students need vibrant, living multilingualism that demonstrates that intellectual work is not singularly about English. And that your professors are not English speakers.
Under the conditions of emergency remote learning, lecturers were under pressure simply to deliver the content of courses. This was true even for lecturers who wanted to use multilingual pedagogies. They were mindful of the need for multilingualism in higher education in South Africa. But theunder which they were teaching were such a hindrance that they defaulted to translation of resources like notes and slides.
For this to happen, the focus must be on capturing African languages in written form to develop lexicon and grammar. This was a challenge during COVID because some web-based learner management systems don’t support texts written in African languages. They don’t have the special characters that a student should use in an exam to show what they know. So it’s difficult to assess the candidate.
Indigenous language teaching resources, such as journal articles and textbooks, are scarce too. So lecturers had few resources to draw on when attempting to move their courses online. And the technology did not allow lecturers to write easily online as they would on a board: As a language teacher, you are bound to write because when students don’t understand what you are trying to teach, you have to put what you are uttering orally into writing for their full grasp.
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