Collaborative Open-Content Platform/Dictionary for Namibian Indigenous Languages

Namibia, a multilingual nation, like other African countries, comprises of numerous indigenous languages besides the declared national language, English. Only recently has the language policy changed to accommodate indigenous languages in primary formal education. Nevertheless only a few Namibian local languages have written material and no on-line dictionary for local languages exists yet. Thus this research project is going to initiate the development of a digitalized Namibian collaborative online dictionary-like resource for creating, defining and storing indigenous languages. We have chosen to use the design research methodology, which will allow us to employ different design techniques during our project implementation. We will start off by evaluating similar existing web-based open-content platforms to inform our decisions on the most suitable design for a local language open content platform for Namibia. We investigate which data structure is most appropriate for local languages storage and how we will model them and also identify a user interface (UI) suitable for accommodating different users of different age groups and knowledge backgrounds.