|
Xibaaryi.com is a site of general information in Wolof, a language which is spoken by over 80% of the Senegalese population. This is the result of the Master's memoir of both Ibra NDIAYE and Kelekey Moussa DIAKHATE (academic year 2008, Master's in Computing, Saint-Louis Gaston Berger University, Senegal).
This site aims at allowing Wolof speakers to access information. It is indeed one of the major solutions to the first of the issues which are taken into consideration in the frame of this work and the detail of which you will find below.
Issues:
The main issue that led to the setting up of this site is the difficulty our people face as regards access to information and the media in general, which is due to the language obstacle. As a matter of fact:
- Only less than 20% (Source) of the Senegalese population understands French (the official language in Senegal) and over 80% of the same population understands and speaks Wolof. However, the written press (on paper or on the web) is in French.
- The written press is only read by a small part of the population understanding the French language (less than 10%). That is not very much rewarding.
- Apart from the radio stations the other media are not doing any better. One good example is that of films and cartoons.
- People in our country watch films without understanding much of anything, which is not acceptable for a country that wants to be developped.
- Our children do not understand the language of the cartoons they watch stupidly and only content themselves with funny scenes, which does not at all stimulate their intellectual abilities.
- The cinema wards which used to be crowded because most people could easily understand the films (Hindu or Western films) they watched and enjoyed, have been changed into commercial centers today. The thing is people have lost interest in the cinema that they do not really understand.
- The formation and training entities do not take into account the language understood and spoken by the majority; so, only French speakers can access those entities.
The second issue -and not the less important- which is taken into consideration is the unemployment problem of the young graduates in Arts (there are loads of them in our universities where they are trained without any objectivity). Unfortunately, this problem has not been solved by our site, but we have done some thinking about that and the answers proposed for the first issue will definitely help to solve the unemployment problem.
Proposed Solutions:
This website is not only a solution to the people who can read Wolof, but also to those who want to practise the language. Therefore, one will have to:
- speed up literacy training in local languages by creating sites in local languages (like this one);
- create newspapers in local languages;
- dub films, documentaries, games, etc. in local languages, namely in Wolof as it is spoken by almost the entire population (in order to make it pay off);
- create softwares in local languages and adjust some of them, for example moodle (for on-line teaching), phpnuke (to create a site without difficulty), etc.
- develop automatic translators from Wolof into French and from French into Wolof. One need those tools to translate the huge quantity of web resources given the lack of State means. The automatic google translator will do the translation into other languages.
Future of the Wolof language:
The linguist Colette Grinevald, researcher at the dynamics of the language laboratory of the Institute for Human Sciences Lyon-II and that helped to define the Unesco criteria vitality of languages, estimated that 50% of the languages disappear d 'by 2100. In some areas, this could be around 90% (as in Australia and America) [1]. Beginning in 2008, the NGO Survival International believes that an indigenous language disappears "every two weeks" [2].
It is estimated that in 2100, the major languages may be1:
- English as language for trade and scientific exchanges in particular.
- Spanish in Latin America (and the southern United States).
- Portuguese in South America, and Africa.
- Chinese and Hindi in Asia.
- Swahili and Wolof in Africa.
Expectations:
That would help to:
- improve the intellectual achievings of the Senegalese populations;
- create thousands of jobs for the students in Arts (translation), for the artists (films dubbing), cinema wards, trading audiovisual products, etc. One has just to picture the thousands of films, games, books, strips, cartoons, documentaries, etc., which are produced around the world each year in other languages that we can dub, to understand the economic interests at stake.
French can still be used, but that must not stop us from realising that a language is a natural resource as soon as it is spoken by a great deal of people. That is the case of Wolof in Senegal and Bambara in Mali.
Microsoft, for one, has understood that much and created the Wolof and Bambara versions of its tools (Windows and Office). So has Google.
The French have understood that much too. They put in place the Francophonie (French-speaking World). The more French is spoken around the world (~ 200,000,000 people), the more jobs there are in France for the French are the ones producing, dubbing and translating for the remaining 140,000,000 French speakers.
Contributions:
You can bring your contribution to this project by sending:
- articles;
- files (audio, pictures, video, documents);
- web links;
- translations of words and articles.
You can also bring your contribution by taking part into:
- the implementation of the site which is done in PHP. You can a request e-mail to the computing team to this address: webmaster@xibaaryi.com
- the translation of tools (moodle, postnuke, etc.), articles in Wolof in order to help the 80% of the Senegalese population that knows no French;
- the financing of the project:
- annual fees for the name of the domain and hosting the site;
- buying computing material (computers, scanners, digital photo cameras, cameoscopes, etc.) for the production of electronic documents, pictures, sounds and videos;
- recruiting staff for a better handling of activities;
- financing the research and development of automatic tools of :
- translation from Wolof into English/French and from English/French into Wolof.
- translitteration tool Wolofal (wolof in arabic letters) <-> Wolof (in latin letters).
- spellchecking in Wolof language
- speech recognition and voice synthesis in Wolof language
- transliteration of Wolof (in Latin characters) to Wolofal (Wolof in arabic characters used by a big part of the Senegalese population)
Members:
- Xarjata Diba Ngeer : Researcher, writer in Wolof language and legal science student at Saint-Louis University.
Contact:
- Senegal:
- El Hadji Mamadou Nguer : +221 33 961 34 81 or +221 33 962 16 01
Thanks for visiting!
|
