A US-based company that develops predictive text-entry software for handheld devices has announced that its solution, LetterWise, now supports 27 commonly used African languages.
The 27 languages supported are: Afrikaans, Amharic, Arabic, Hausa, Igbo, Kinyarwanda, Lingala, Luganda, Luo, Malagasy, Ndebele, Oromo, Oshiwambo, Pular, Sepedi, Seswati, Setswana, Shona, Somali, Sotho, Swahili, Tsonga, Venda, Wolof, Xhosa, Yoruba and Zulu.
"We see linguistic diversity as critical in leveraging the high projected average revenue per user (ARPU) potential in sub-Saharan Africa, as both mobile use and SMS continue to rise," says Howard Gutowitz, founder and CEO of Eatoni Ergonomics.
"The ability to SMS in your own language is added encouragement to send text messages and stimulates ARPU."
Siemens, Philips and Panasonic have all licensed the rights to install Eatoni's LetterWise software, which supports a total of 150 languages worldwide, on a variety of their cordless and handheld devices.
Gutowitz says that in higher-end handsets, it is possible for individuals to download the software directly to the handset and choose which language(s) they want.
"However, one of the most interesting possibilities for SA is the low-end handset market, where the big concern is cost, in particular memory cost," says Gutowitz.
"Usually it would not be economical for a manufacturer to supply the SA languages, as most software of this type uses up to a megabyte of memory. By contrast, Eatoni's product can do it with a total of about 35k of memory."
He says although telecoms growth is stalling in mature markets such as Europe, a country like Nigeria - where revenue earned from the average cellphone is twice that from the average US cellphone - is a good example of the growth potential on the continent.
Quoting examples of the growing African market, he says MTN recently announced that it had reached a total of 6.6 million subscribers by the end of 2002, with the growth being led by its Nigerian operations, where users topped the one million mark by 10 February.
Cell C also claimed that it had signed up about one million subscribers in 2002, beating its projections for its first year of operations.
Gutowitz says conversation and storytelling, which are valued in African culture, drive up minutes of use and ARPU. For example, in Nigeria, the average cellphone is used 200 minutes a week, compared with 154 minutes in France, 149 in Japan and 88 in Germany, according to published reports.
"Language is a critical issue in many African nations, with people taking enormous pride in their own language and culture, which is why the ability to text in one's own language should be of tremendous value to African phone customers."
He says the major manufacturers will only truly begin to make an effort to serve South African needs if the SA market makes those needs known to them.
"Very often product managers try to dismiss the issues when we discuss them, by saying that it is not necessary to have all these African languages, as the majority of Africans speak English.
"In order to overcome this, we need evidence that there is real desire in the country for African languages to be made available, and this will be driven in the majority by the press, the carriers and the government."
Gutowitz believes the South African government could take care of such a problem easily, simply by mandating that cellular phones sold in SA must support all the country's official languages.
"The social benefits are clear: throughout the developed world, excluding the US, text messaging has become the major channel by which the youth market communicates, and it is extremely important that they are able to communicate in their home language."
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