Langa Khumalo

• PhD, Linguistics.
• Executive Director at North West University (Potchefstroom Campus)

Democratizing access to information is an enabler for our digital future. It can transform how knowledge is created, preserved, and shared, and strengthen the connection between academics and the communities they serve. Yet, open scholarship is influenced by history and politics. This article explores the foundations underlying open scholarship as...

South Africa recognizes eleven official languages, although more languages are spoken in the country. Most of these languages are considered underresourced: there is only a limited set of computational resources available. This includes linguistic data collections as well as computational linguistic tools. This scarcity of resources limits the comp...

Terminology development and practical lexicography are crucial in language intel­lectualization. In South Africa, the Department of Sport, Arts and Culture, National Lexicography Units, universities, commercial publishers and other organizations have been developing terminol­ogy and publishing terminographical/lexicographical resources to facilitat...

There is paucity of computational tools to support the 11 official languages in South Africa. The need exist particularly to develop these for historically disadvantaged indigenous official languages. Hitherto text-based human language technologies in South Africa have been developed by CTexT through the Autshumato project, and speech technologies...

IsiNdebele is a scantily resourced language of the Bantu group spoken in Zimbabwe. The etymology of the name of the language is steeped in both myth and certain historical language contact situations. It is in this sense that while the history of the Ndebele people is argued to a short one, the language has a long and illustrious history that is tr...

Ontologies as a component of Semantic Web technologies are used in Sub-Saharan Africa mainly as part of ontology-driven information systems that may include an interface in a local language. IsiZulu is one such local language, which is spoken by about 23 million people in South Africa, and for which verbalisation patterns to verbalise an ontology e...

The term intellectualization was famously used in the Prague School to describe a process that a language undergoes in its development and refinement. In our South African context intellectualization entails a carefully planned process of hastening the cultivation and growth of indigenous official African languages so that they effectively function...

The language isiZulu belongs to the Nguni group of languages, which also include isiXhosa, isiNdebele and siSwati. Of the four Nguni languages, isiZulu is the most dominant language in South Africa, which is spoken by 22.7 % of the country’s 51.8 million population. However, isiZulu (and even more so the other Nguni languages) still remains an unde...

The isiZulu verb is known for its morphological complexity, which is a subject for on-going linguistics research, as well as for prospects of computational use, such as controlled natural language interfaces, machine translation, and spellcheckers. To this end, we seek to answer the question as to what the precise grammar rules for the isiZulu comp...

The isiZulu verb is known for its morphological complexity, which is a subject for on-going linguistics research, as well as for prospects of computational use, such as controlled natural language interfaces, machine translation, and spellcheckers. To this end, we seek to answer the question as to what the precise grammar rules for the isiZulu comp...

Correct spelling contributes to good content accessibility and readability for textual documents. However, there are few spellcheckers for Bantu languages such as isiZulu, the major language in South Africa. The objective of this research is to investigate development of spellcheckers for isiZulu and, more generally, an approach that can be reused...

It has been persuasively argued that from end of the Second World War, language imperialism became a new strategic instrument for global domination (see Phillipson, 2014, 2015). To fuel this agenda, English especially has been paraded as a unifying global lingua franca without sufficient focus on the attendant detrimental effect on other languages,...

The University of KwaZulu-Natal (UKZN) is compiling a series of Language for Special Purposes (LSP) dictionaries for various specialized subject domains in line with its language policy and plan. The focus in this paper is the term extraction for words in the linguistics subject domain. This paper advances the use of frequency analysis and the keyw...

The language isiZulu is the largest in South Africa by numbers of first language speakers, yet, it is still an underresourced language. In this paper, we approach the grammar piecemeal from a natural language generation approach, and viewed from a potential utility for verbalizing OWL ontologies as a tangible use case. The elaborate rules of the gr...

Agreement lies at the core of sentence structure. A verb typically must enter into a syntactic agreement relationship with a nominal. This article presents an analysis of the subject marker in the isiNdebele language. The focus of the article is on agreement between the verb and its arguments. Agreement between a head noun and its modifiers will be...

IsiZulu is one of the eleven official languages of South Africa and roughly half the population can speak it. It is the first (home) language for over 10 million people in South Africa. Only a few computational resources exist for isiZulu and its related Nguni languages, yet the imperative for tool development exists. We focus on natural language g...

This article discusses the Ndebele passive derivation using the Lexical Mapping Theory (henceforth LMT). Using LMT the article discusses the syntactic properties of the passive sentence in Ndebele. The article demonstrates that the architecture of LMT is largely applicable to the Ndebele language. The article further demonstrates that Ndebele is un...

Mobile phone technology has revolutionised the art of communication across all societies. Access to this form of communication has made personal contact much easier than before, with mobile phone networks in many countries now reaching rural areas where fixed telephones were rare. However, the popularity of mobile phones and mobile text messaging h...

This article discusses the first-ever monolingual general Ndebele dictionary, Isicha-zamazwi SesiNdebele (henceforth the ISN) within the context of the history of lexicography and the compilation of dictionaries in Ndebele. It further assesses the scope of the dictionary with regard to its structure. It also discusses decisions taken by the editors...

It is an established view in lexicography that the most important function of early dictionaries was to provide information on the meaning of words of a particular language. Over the years, tendencies have emerged with modern dictionaries providing detailed linguistic infor-mation resulting in more informative dictionaries. This article discusses t...

This article discusses the presentation of etymological information in the prospective Advanced Ndebele Dictionary (henceforth the AND) which is still in its planning stage. The AND will be a successor to Isichazamazwi SesiNdebele (henceforth the ISN), a medium-sized, general-purpose, monolingual Ndebele dictionary published in 2001. The AND will n...

This article discusses the first-ever monolingual general Ndebele dictionary, Isicha-zamazwi SesiNdebele (henceforth the ISN) within the context of the history of lexicography and the compilation of dictionaries in Ndebele. It further assesses the scope of the dictionary with regard to its structure. It also discusses decisions taken by the editors...

p>Abstract: In this article the writer evaluates the defining formats that were used in defining headwords in the first monolingual General Ndebele Dictionary, Isichazamazwi SesiNdebele (ISN). The emphasis in the ISN was on the concept of user-friendliness. The article establishes that defining formats in the ISN are a judicious mixture mainly of t...

p>Abstract: This article discusses the presentation of etymological information in the prospective Advanced Ndebele Dictionary (henceforth the AND) which is still in its planning stage. The AND will be a successor to Isichazamazwi SesiNdebele (henceforth the ISN), a medium-sized, general-purpose, monolingual Ndebele dictionary published in 2001. Th...

It is an established view in lexicography that the most important function of early dictionaries was to provide information on the meaning of words of a particular language. Over the years, tendencies have emerged with modern dictionaries providing detailed linguistic information resulting in more informa-tive dictionaries. This article discusses t...

This article discusses the presentation of etymological information in the prospective Advanced Ndebele Dictionary (henceforth the AND) which is still in its planning stage. The AND will be a successor to Isichazamazwi SesiNdebele (henceforth the ISN), a medium-sized, general-purpose, monolingual Ndebele dictionary published in 2001. The AND will n...

In this article linguistic changes and/or developments in the Ndebele language spoken in Zimbabwe are investigated and analyzed and the implications these have for term creation and standardization through lexicography. This is followed by a brief historical analysis of the nature and causes of language change in Ndebele. The first part of the arti...

It is an established view in lexicography that the most important function of early dictionaries was to provide information on the meaning of words of a particular language. Over the years, tendencies have emerged with modern dictionaries providing detailed linguistic infor-mation resulting in more informative dictionaries. This article discusses t...

This paper presents a comparison between the passive and the stative derivations. The stative derivation, which is variously referred to in the literature as the neuter, neuter-passive, quasi-passive, neuter-stative, metastatic-potential, descriptive passive 2 (Satyo 1985), is described by Doke (1947) as closely similar to the passive derivation. D...

This paper was originally presented at the 6th International Conference of the African Association for Lexicography, at the University of the North in South Africa. The paper was later published in LEXIKOS 12. In this paper the writer critically evaluates the defining formats that were used in defining headwords in the first-ever-monolingual Genera...

A paper presented at the University of Cambridge, Department of Linguistics. This paper will demonstrate the extent to which conversation analysis, especially turn taking applies in Ndebele. The paper will first test whether conversation analysis is a method or theory. It however, has largely been viewed as a method of analysing linguistic recordin...