Overview of HLT's for South African Bantu languages

Abstract

South Africa is one of the few countries in the world that boasts a large number of official languages. Due to the efforts of the government and the local research and development (R&D) community all the official languages are enabled with regard to human language technology (HLT). We present in this paper the current status of HLT's for a few selected official South African languages, namely isiZulu, Sepedi, Tshivenda, and Xitsonga based on a national HLT audit covering all official languages of South Africa. We discuss the HLT position of the above languages in relation to other official South African languages, and also explore the type of data collections, technology modules and applications currently available in the R&D community for these four languages.