The South African Centre for Digital Language Resources (SADiLaR) is a national centre supported by the Department of Science and Innovation (DSI). SADiLaR has an enabling function, with a focus on all official languages of South Africa, supporting research and development in the domains of language technologies and language-related studies in the humanities and social sciences. READ MORE...
LATEST NEWS & EVENTS
South African Centre for Digital Language Resources (SADiLaR) forges ahead with an initiative to help students with basic academic writing.
SADiLaR’s language development and testing node, the Inter-institutional Centre for Language Development and Assessment (ICELDA), has developed a series of videos, called Write It, to fill the gap by guiding students through writing.
Language Resources Audit to support multilingualism is underway in public universities of South Africa. Language continues to be a barrier to access and success for many students at South African higher education institutions. This was noted by the Department of Higher Education and Training (DHET) in their revised Language Policy Framework for Higher Education.
Language and culture are closely intertwined; a person’s language influences their perceptions of the world and shapes their cultural identity. This is why, when a language is lost, we lose so much. Dr Sheena Shah and Dr Matthias Brenzinger are working on a SADiLaR-supported project in collaboration with the ebaPhuthi (Phuthi people), a minority group in Lesotho and South Africa, to restore and revitalise the siPhuthi language. This is taking place through several initiatives, including working with the community to develop and produce a multimodal corpus of siPhuthi. Key to this project is the active involvement of the community.
SADiLaR is pleased to announce the secondment of Professor Tobie van Dyk, a highly respected applied linguist from the School of Languages at North-West University (NWU) in South Africa. Prior to this secondment, Prof van Dyk was Head of the Centre for Academic and Professional Language Practice and Director of the School of Languages, both at NWU.
“Professor van Dyk’s expertise in the field of applied linguistics and his well-established national and international networks are essential for SADiLaR to fulfill its mandate,” says Mr Juan Steyn, SADiLaR’s Director of Operations.
The Spelling Checkers for South African Languages, a spelling and hyphenation checker tool for ten of South Africa’s official languages excluding English, is now available free to download from our website. The spell checker tool offers an extensive wordlist for Afrikaans, isiNdebele, isiXhosa, isiZulu, Siswati, Sesotho, Sesotho sa Leboa, Setswana, Tshivenḓa and Xitsonga.
Find out more and download the Spelling Checkers for South African Languages
To build up the field of linguistics in nine of South Africa’s official languages the University of South Africa (UNISA) node of SADiLaR, which focuses on language resource development, has created a linguistics termbank which is now freely available online.
DH-IGNITE is a regional event hosted by SADiLaR and the ESCALATOR programme aiming to support the development of an active community of practice in Digital Humanities (DH) and Computational Social Sciences (CSS) in South Africa.
- 6 DH-IGNITE events to reach all 26 public universities across the country.
- Participate in person or virtually.
- We’ll talk about digital/computational methodologies in humanities and social sciences!
Visit the DH-IGNITE WEBSITE for more information on what to expect.
SWiP: "Preserving languages: Open, free and accessible knowledge for all.”
SWiP is a collaborative initiative by the South African Centre for Digital Language Resources (SADiLaR); the free encyclopaedia (Wikipedia) and the Pan South African Language Board (PanSALB). This project aims to bring together communities of language practice practically to advance and celebrate the use of South African Languages and aims to encourage communities of practice to actively participate in contributing to the free encyclopaedia (Wikipedia). Learn more about SWiP