isiXhosa: What makes this South African language click

By Mazhun Idris

Omar Sakr, the acclaimed Australian poet of Turkish-Lebanese ancestry, eloquently describes the irony of "our beautiful voices" being sometimes lost in translation.

"And asked the bird if it feels trapped by its song, by its language being known only as melody," he writes in the poem 'I woke up this morning'.

In life, as in art, languages can be like birdsong — melodious and fascinating but not intrinsically understood.

Xhosa is one such language, unique for its click consonants and with only about 10 million speakers worldwide.

For the uninitiated, the South African singer-songwriter Siki Jo-An's chart-busting Click Song — a homage to Miriam Makeba's version of the traditional Xhosa wedding classic Qongqothwane — is a good starting point.

The performer's craft draws you in, the feet and hands assume a life of their own, and the "click words" resonate long after the song has ended.

That's Xhosa for you. At once arresting, although there's more to the language than that.

Ethnic moorings

Xhosa is one among a dozen official languages in South Africa, where the constitution was amended in July 2023 to include South African Sign Language in the list.

In this multilingual country of 60 million people that aptly wears the sobriquet of "Rainbow Nation" to mirror its racial and multicultural diversity, Xhosa or isiXhosa represents the second largest cultural group after Zulu-speaking people.

isiXhosa is one of the Nguni languages, and Xhosa-speaking people are concentrated in the Eastern Cape regions.

In isiXhosa, South Africa is "Mzansi", which comes from the noun "uMzantsi", meaning "south".

"Bridging language disparity requires technology," says Cael Marquard, a South African native English speaker who moved from learning isiXhosa in high school to majoring in the language as an undergraduate.

Cael is a proud isiXhosa linguist and language rights activist. He is passionate about advancing the language online by localising digital resources and creating the isiXhosa web-based dictionary.

Click to learn

According to the live information page of isiXhosa.click live dictionary, it is a free, open-source, and easily usable dictionary for indigenous language learners.

Led by Cael, the Cape Town-based team of developers and linguists who built the online dictionary aims to provide users with click-on resources to learn isiXhosa.

"Due to our history of colonialism and apartheid, Xhosa language remained hidden from the world. It is still in its infancy in terms of spread. We are trying to have more digital resources developed to increase proficiency in the language," says the student of computer science at the University of Cape Town.

The open-source online dictionary, which grew out of a lack of free isiXhosa resources and high-quality content online, is easy to use.

Cael points out that the primary objective is to ease learners' journey toward attaining language fluency.

"Most of those involved in this project speak isiXhosa as their second language, which has helped improve the efficacy and optimise the dictionary. We also work with native speakers," he tells TRT Afrika.

Outsourcing model

Like a wiki site, isiXhosa.click is a community-driven platform that also outsources language data in a collaborative interface. Users and visitors are welcome to edit entries or submit new words in an organised manner.

The South African Centre for Digital Language Resources (SADiLaR) partially funds the project, aiming to ease language acquisition and vocabulary accessibility.

"To ensure quality, words go through a moderation process before being accepted, and these can be enhanced with various types of grammatical information and sentences as examples," explains Cael.

The dictionary is searchable either in English or isiXhosa, with results being returned immediately as you type. With over 3,000 entries, one only needs to open a user account to suggest new words for inclusion in the dictionary.

The contribution of isiXhosa.click in helping students enhance their vocabulary and bridge language parity has been highlighted in two articles published at the AfriLex 2024 conference of the African Society of Lexicography.

The project has also been featured on SADiLaR, the University of Cape Town's Digital Open Textbooks for Development (DOT4), and Rising Voices' digital directory.