POLOKWANE – Xitsonga.org, a website that hosts a fully-fledged Tsonga dictionary, was launched by Sneidon Dumela in 2012.
The idea for the website, Dumela said, comes from a conversation he had with his friends about how information on the Tsonga language is hard to get hold of. He then began to work on the content and launched the website in March of that year. “At first, the website allowed anyone to register and add content to the site, but now there is a team of eight trusted people who work on the content of the website,” Dumela explained.
What followed the website was Dumela developing a Xitsonga application for mobile devices. He said this came from noticing that a majority of the people who used the website, were using it on mobile devices. “In today’s society, everyone is going mobile so I decided to design the app to make it easier for people to access the dictionary,” he said.
Since the launch of the app, it has received 10 downloads every day and the Xitsonga.org website has received half a million views. What makes the website even more interesting is that it offers online classes, which include daily exercises that are drawn up by Dumela himself, that will teach one how to speak and write in Tsonga. “I asked my high school teacher to help me draw up exercises as this will enhance the quality of the exercises and ensure that they are grammatically correct.”
On the future of his app, Dumela said he hopes the app will receive more than 10 000 downloads by next year. He is also thinking of including other languages as well as other African languages to the app. He has his sights on a Nigerian language and if that goes according to plan, his app will reach a much larger audience as Nigeria’s mobile usage is on a much larger scale than South Africa.
The Xitsonga dictionary app is free to download but is only available for Android devices for now, however, Dumela is looking at expanding to Blackberry as well as Apple devices.
Visit the Xitsonga.org website to see Dumela’s work.
