NISC South Africa

Southern African Linguistics and Applied Language Studies 2003, 21 (4) : 189–201
© NISC (pty) Ltd. www.nisc.co.za

Spoken language corpora for the nine official African languages of South Africa

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Authors: J Allwood¹ and AP Hendrikse²

¹Â Department of Linguistics, University of Gothenburg, RenstrÃ¶mparken, S-312 98 Gothenburg, Sweden
²Â Department of Linguistics, University of South Africa, PO Box 392, Pretoria 0003, South Africa

Corresponding Author: AP Hendrikse (E-mail: hendrap@unisa.ac.za)

Abstract:
In this paper we give an outline of a corpus planning project which aims to develop linguistic resources for the nine official African languages of South Africa in the form of corpora, more specifically spoken language corpora. In the course of the article, we will address issues such as spoken language vs. written language, register vs. activity and normative vs. non-normative approaches to corpus planning. We then give an outline of the design of a spoken language corpus for the nine official African languages of South Africa. We consider issues such as representativity and sampling (urbanâ€“rural, dialects, gender, social class and activities), transcription standards and conventions as well as the problems emanating from widespread loans and code switching and other forms of language mix characteristic of spoken language. Finally, we summarise the status of the project at present and plans for the future.

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