Harnessing Digital Technology in the Revitalisation of the Linguistic Heritage of Zimbabwe: Possibilities and Challenges

Abstract

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.