BY FIONA MOTSA
MBABANE– SiSwati is now officially a Facebook featured language.
SiSwati National Language Board (SNLB) Master of Education in Language and Media Education Thembekile Msibi was happy to reveal this new feature for emaSwati.
“This will encourage and strengthen the use of the siSwati language as it will now be used on Facebook. This comes at a time when the world has been encouraged to respect native languages.
“Facebook has become a very powerful tool for preserving languages. Most of the youth use this social media platform and if you want to conserve knowledge, you need to do it through the youth. If you remove the language from the youth, you have eradicated it,” said Msibi.
Msibi further mentioned that mentioned that since a lot of the youth were on Facebook, at least the positive would be to see them use their own language.
“The youth will be able to use siSwati language on Facebook. This will further enhance the skill of reading, writing and speaking the language. This will also give the youth pride in their language as well as having more speakers and respect for the siSwati languages,” said Msibi.
The SiSwati National Language Board member further mentioned they were working on also having the language option installed on cellphone devices.
“We are working with South Africa to have the siSwati language option installed on mobile phones like all other languages,” said Msibi.
