Build our national languages using Wiktionaries

There are eleven official South African languages. Many of them do not yet have their own dictionaries in the language itself.

Wiktionary is a free Internet project for the open, public and collaborative creation of on-line dictionaries. These dictionaries will thereafter be freely available to the whole world through the Internet.

The first step to take is to register a free username and password. Do it here. If you need to know more about it first, read here.

Now you have done that, you have full rights to create a page or edit an existing one. (If you feel the need of a full but easy tutorial, start here).

In a Wiktionary, a page is a definition of a word in its language.

To see what this looks like, go for example to the Bukantswe ya Sesotho - Bukantsoe ea Sesotho. Others you might look at are the English Wiktionary and the Afrikaans Wikiwoordeboek, or, going outside South Africa, the wikamusi ya Kiswahili or the Victionarium Latinum.

Links to these and other pages are listed below. Some of them are little more than a blank page at the moment, and three of the South African official languages lack even that much in Wictionary.

The creation of a dictionary in a language is a historic step forward. It provides a basis for scholarly development of the language and its literature. It also provides the basis for education in that language and more specifically for popular and widespread political education.

This work is best suited for speakers and/or readers of the given language. Otherwise, it requires no special qualification. Using Wiktionaries, the owners of the language can create the dictionary of their language. The example of the Sesotho one seems to suggest that once the process gets going it can move very fast.

A link is also given below to SAlanguages.com. This site contains some glossaries and lists of terms that may assist you to start building the wiktionary of your choice.

Wiktionary and related links: