isiXhosa.click: Student-led project makes isiXhosa vocabulary easily accessible

Funded partially by the South African Centre for Digital Language Resources (SADiLaR), the free, open-source and user-friendly dictionary allows users to search for a word by simply typing either the English or isiXhosa word in a search bar to show live search results. As the user clicks on a word, they can find more information, such as examples and related words. The dictionary currently has 2062 entries.

“isiXhosa.click is a student-led project at the University of Cape Town (UCT) that was first established as a hobby and passion project by the project team in 2021 because we felt that none of the existing isiXhosa-English dictionaries came close enough to fulfilling our vision of a free, open, community-driven and easy-to-use isiXhosa-English dictionary," says project leader Cael Marquard, who is a computer science honours student at UCT and part-time developer. The other team members are Jacob Lund, William Moultrie, and Luvo Gcingca.

“All the founding members of this project studied isiXhosa as a subject up to their final year in high school, and one striking part of that experience was how limited the access to high-quality and reliable online resources was,” he recalls. “Students studying isiXhosa must generally choose between a high-quality, professional dictionary like the Oxford English Xhosa Dictionary or the Greater Dictionary of isiXhosa, or a lower-quality, machine-generated dictionary. Both options have limitations, in that the former has all rights reserved and cannot be easily accessed or carried around as they are in print form; while the latter often has dubious or untrustworthy translations, as much of the content is machine-generated from parallel corpuses. The print editions are also prohibitively expensive and hard to get a hold of; the only way that most students will be able to use one is by borrowing a copy from a teacher or library," he explains.

Helping first-language isiXhosa patients

“This online dictionary is a living resource, subject to being updated and improved over time. It not only helps to resolve the lack of online resources but also makes the language much more easily accessible to people,” Marquard continues. “One example is our initial focus of adding healthcare-related vocabulary. Here in the Western Cape, many of the patients in hospitals are first-language isiXhosa speakers. Having these words immediately available on their phones makes it much easier for doctors to communicate with their patients.”

According to Marquard, the SADiLaR funding was mainly used to pay isiXhosa honours students at UCT to upload words from an isiXhosa statistics glossary compiled by Tim Low, a senior lecturer in Statistical Sciences and Mathematics at UCT, as well as add a few of their own words and example sentences. “Other miscellaneous activities that took place during the grant period included general maintenance and improvement of the website's code and moving the site to the UCT Department of Computer Science’s server for stability. The code is freely available for download on the GitHub developer platform,” he comments.

Marquard and his team are grateful for the support received from SADiLaR. “I would like to extend my utmost thanks to SADiLaR and all those who have assisted me over the course of the project. The programme has allowed us to improve the site and develop crucial connections,” he says.

Crucial connections for further collaboration

“Thanks to a colloquium hosted by SADiLaR to discuss various Digital Humanities Open Educational Resources (DH-OER) projects, I had the opportunity to collaborate with another young researcher, Mthuli Buthelezi, on features relating to the site. Whilst not directly related to the grant itself, this would not have been possible were it not for the DH OER Champions initiative (offered through SADiLaR’s ESCALATOR programme). Mthuli worked to translate the entirety of the website's interface into isiZulu and create a parallel instance for an isiZulu Language for Special Purposes (LSP) dictionary that he is working with. We presented this work at the 28th International Conference of the African Association for Lexicography (AfriLex 2024), which took place in Pretoria a few weeks ago.”

Menno van Zaanen, SADiLaR’s professor in digital humanities expressed his admiration and appreciation for what Marquard and his team have achieved. “I'm extremely impressed by the work that the team have done. This is making a major impact, not only for the language but hopefully for the team as well. May their good work continue.”

According to Marquard, their future plans include collaborating with other academics, lexicographers, and language practitioners in order to extend and improve the dictionary. “On this front, I have already received many offers to collaborate from various people that I met at AfriLex, including the isiNdebele and siSwati National Lexicography Units (NLU), and I hope that these will be fruitful. Our key focus areas will include multilingualism in the dictionary (bring it to more languages), user experience, lexicographic tools, and extending the database of words,” he says.

Fun fact:

The isiXhosa.click site includes an isiXhosa Wordle game that offers a new six-letter word every day.

Get involved:

If you'd like to help the project, submitting new words and editing old ones would be greatly appreciated. First, you will need to create an account with the site. To do so, click the ‘Sign in with Google’ button in the top right corner. From your Google account, IsiXhosa.click will only record your email (in order for the team to email you about any issues regarding your account or the site) and your Google OpenID Connect ID (to identify you when you log in).