Developing a Multilingual Telephone Based Information System in African Languages

This paper introduces the first project of its kind within the Southern African language engineering context. It focuses on the role of idiosyncratic linguistic and pragmatic features of the different languages concerned and how these features are to be accommodated within (a) the creation of applicable speech corpora and (b) the design of the system at large. An introduction to the multilingual realities of South Africa and its implications for the development of databases is followed by a description of the system and different options that may be implemented in the system.