Vision

The San & Khoi Digital Archive aims to provide a digital application to facilitate an easy, fun, place-based engagement with endangered southern African languages. 

It is hoped that this application will allow southern Africans and others to use and interact with an automated digitised system of a southern African indigenous language of choice, with an initial focus on Khoekhoegowab and NIuu. 

The digital application will be landscape-contextual, generating words in the endangered languages used for indigenous plants, their medicinal use and use in rituals, while highlighting sites in the landscape important for indigenous memory. 

The application will be underpinned by an online archive of language glossaries, as well as accessible resources on the history of endangered southern African languages, and metadata on the cultural value of related indigenous knowledges.

What are the aims of this archive? 

• To establish the N|uu and Khoekhoegowab languages as official southern African lanaguages in the long term through greater exposure. 
• Redress and healing for colonised communities that have suffered the devastating effects of cultural genocide and the resultant loss of their indigenous languages.
• Strengthened public understanding of our language commonalities, supporting a more racially and economically integrated society.
• A richer, accessible shared knowledge-base of indigenous plants, places, and cultural rituals and their link to endangered southern African languages.
• Development of an engaged language learning process, using digital technologies and linguistic methods to restore erased languages as living languages.
• Greater public and student access to endangered languages, strengthening the case for Khoekhoegowab becoming a fourth language at UCT, in alignment with its transformation agenda and Vision 2030.
• Development of African multilingualism skills, to further economic development in environmental justice, and indigenous knowledge systems.
• Meeting the language learning needs of all persons, inclusive of youth, unemployed persons, and people with disabilities, in learning endangered southern African languages.

What do we hope to achieve?

• An expanded public archive of Khoekhoegowab and NIuu languages and related indigenous knowledges.
• Strengthened understanding of our language commonalities.
• Mobile, location-sensitive access to two endangered languages in southern Africa, inclusive of people with disabilities, unemployed persons and youth.
• The possibility in the second phase of extension of the digital archive to other endangered languages across southern Africa.
• Increased public awareness of, and engagement with, Khoekhoegowab and NIuu languages.
• Centralised access to all resources related to endangered African languages and related indigenous knowledges.