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Indigenous Zimbabwean languages have through history endured marginalisation in terms of functional status in government administration, law, education, business, the media, science and technology. Though such marginalisation may be traced back to the colonial 'inheritance situation' (Bambgbose 1991), a solution to it may lie to some extent in the use of digital technology. It is argued that digitisation provides a propitious window to reverse language marginalisation or to intensify language revitalisation efforts where they have already been initiated. This can be realised through digitising all literary and non-literary works in the indigenous languages, building corpora of indigenous languages, using databases of indigenous languages to write dictionaries, filing other art work such as theatre and drama, music, poetry and film all in digital format. Notwithstanding the potential of digital technology, it was found out from interviews and web analyses that efforts to harness the technology in language revitalisation remain stunted. This paper also argues that the expense of the gadgetry needed to run the digital technology, negative attitudes towards indigenous languages, lack of resources to carry out language documentation field trips, lack of innovative intellectuals and personnel skilled in digital technology stand in the way of efforts to restore and expand the status of the indigenous languages of Zimbabwe.

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The human species is in great danger of extinction due to the novel coronavirus that was first detected in China around December 2019. By March 2021, the world had witnessed over 116million cases, of which 36,223 are Zimbabwean. The disease that the coronavirus stimulates is quite fatal and has seen 2.57million lives succumbing to it, of which 1483 are Zimbabwean, by the same date. No cure has been discovered for it yet, though scientific researchers have already discovered several vaccines with varying efficacies. Employing a socio-pragmatic approach, the chapter explores the impact of fake covid-19 social media communications on efforts to minimize infections and fatalities in Zimbabwe, an already endangered country. It accomplishes this by qualitatively analyzing purposively sampled fake communications in circulation on social media as well as some of the utterances and behaviors people make in response to them. The chapter demonstrates the negative impact of the communications on international mitigating efforts and emphasizes the need for the government, media practitioners and social workers to always be watchful for such misleading communications and in every case to quickly counter their impact by availing correct information to the people.

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