African Languages to be recognised internationally
By Rebecca Wanjiku, Highway Africa News Agency

CAPE TOWN December 1, 2004 - Africans wishing to use local languages
in Internet domain names and content can now do so, courtesy of a new
movement to internationalise domain names.

Internationalised Domain Names (IDNs) seek to recognise the distinct
African languages and characters without necessarily encoding them
into English. This means that African languages with characters
different from the English alphabet can easily be used.

In Africa, domain names currently only use letters of the English
alphabet and even where local languages are transliterated, the
meanings can sometimes be distorted due to lack of critical accents on
the key boards.

At the ongoing International Corporation for Assigned Names and
Numbers (ICANN) regional conference, the urgency of IDNs has taken
centre stage and its proponents are touting it as a solution to
Africa's communication problems.

Mouhamet Diop, an ICANN board member from Senegal, describes IDNs as a
good choice for Africans to "feel themselves in a new environment and
communicate the way they do in their daily lives."

"I am not afraid of technical challenges, its time to say 'we can make
it'. It's hard listening to technical people talking about Africa and
IDN. It's the first step to allow people to feel themselves in an
environment where they can deal with their issues the way they want,"
Diop told workshop participants.

So how will IDNs work? Once an organisation or community's domain name
is registered, the language can be unicoded and a dictionary developed
which will allow registrars, world wide, to pick it up and install on
local servers.

Here is an illustration in the African context - if the Kikuyu
community in Kenya
decides to register the domain name www.mugikuyu.com (but with proper accents
unavailable on this key board), the community itself will be
responsible for developing the relevant linguistic tables which other
stakeholders may convert into unicode.

This means that local communities can use the Internet to communicate
and do business. It will also open the internet to many millions of
people who can only read and write their mother tongues. The net
result will be to make the internet more inclusive.

According to Valentin Nemeth, a senior engineer at the Thawte internet
security company, IDNs will also protect intellectual property and
trademarks. "It will now be possible to secure trademarks that are not
necessarily in English because there will be international standards,"
says Nemeth.

However, Diop argues that trademark issues properly rest with the
relevant regulating authority, adding that policies must be formulated
to fight trademark infringement.

The IDN question reached centre stage in the last three years after
ICANN responded to a wave of protest coming from Asia Pacific
countries such as Japan, China and Korea. Their particular concern is
that respective languages cannot be written at all using western
alphabets.

Since then, ICANN has formed committees in all regions to come up with
questions that need to been addressed.

Vint Cerf, ICANN chairman says IDNs offer immense opportunities, but
at the same time, create their own challenges such as the registration
of thousands of new domain names and the fact that dedicated keyboards
must be designed and built to support each language.

While sharing his experience as president of African Academy of
languages, Adama Samassekou reminded participants that Africa is the
only continent where children go to school and study in languages
other than their own.

He urged all stakeholders to make a special effort to ensure that IDNs
succeed in Africa.

The African Academy of Languages was created by African heads of state
to validate the use of African languages in official functions.
However Samassekou reminded delegates about lethargy within African
leadership pointing out that Swahili was recommended as an official
language of Organisation of Africa Unity (now Africa Union) in 1986
but was only implemented in July 2004. Swahili is widely spoken in 15
East and Central African countries.

The former president of the World Summit on Information Society WSIS)
preparatory committee promised to tackle the issue of African
languages in Accra and Tunis during the Africa bureau meetings and
WSIS phase II respectively.

IDN may be a nice song to many linguists and computer scientists but
Maxime Some from University of Versailles says there is no hope if
there is no harmony between scientists developing the technology and
linguists.

"Computer scientists are ignoring linguists and going on with their
inventions. Scientists and linguists need to work together. There is a
need to break walls and work in unity," concluded Some.