The potential of artificial intelligence (AI) for decolonising education in South Africa through the development of indigenous languages

Abstract

Despite having 12 officially recognised languages (with the addition of South African Sign Language on 3 May 2023), South Africa’s education system is becoming increasingly monolingual. The current article makes the case for employing artificial intelligence (AI) to improve multilingualism in South Africa, with specific reference to the educational context. The article discusses the value of first language education, particularly in the context of decolonisation, and shows how AI can be leveraged to facilitate education in all South African languages. Google Translate has emerged as the most popular machine translation platform, and with the introduction of AI to Google Translate in 2016, and later improvements in 2020, Google Translate has achieved a level of accuracy that is sufficient for comprehension in a number of language pairs. This platform’s accuracy is still insufficient for Sintu languages, but as is argued in the current article, this accuracy can be improved by expanding online corpora and by integrating Google Translate into the classroom. The article makes practical suggestions as to how this can be accomplished.