Durban - KwaZulu-Natal has a new language institute which seeks to reconnect the Zulu language with its mathematical foundation and history.

The IsiZulu Language Development Institute (Zula-Di) was launched on Saturday at UKZN’s Killie Campbell Museum.

The institute is under the management of Princess Nonhlanhla Zulu-Dindi, who will be working closely with former member of parliament and scholar, Dr Makhosi Khoza. Khoza, who is the president of the Bantu Languages Development Institute (Bala-Di), has been at the forefront of fixing the defective design of Bantu languages and has been challenging linguistic exclusion of learners from poor households.

In 2017 she published the Zulu grammar academic textbook, UZALO, which focuses on the decolonisation and reconstruction of Bantu languages. Based on her research, in the book she introduces a five-vowel and 12-noun cluster set and mathematically configured comprehensive grammar system.

Khoza told the Sunday Tribune that their mission was to end linguicide and that they had started with Zulu as one of their pilot projects. “I discovered that isiZulu noun classes are not 17, as it was proposed by the German linguist Carl Meinhof, or nine, as reviewed by British-born South Africa linguist, Clement Doke. “There are actually 12 and the nine Bantu languages are quantity-sensitive and are distinctly different from English and Afrikaans,” said Khoza.

She explained that Bantu languages carried a mathematical logic and that, according to The Universal Book of Mathematics written by David J Darling, black African women were the earliest mathematicians.

Dr Makhosi Khoza is working with the IsiZulu language Development Institute to end linguicide. Picture: Supplied/ Makhosi Khoza.

“Are we going to school to unlearn? As Zula-Di, we want to reconnect isiZulu language with its mathematical foundation and history and remove the colonial impurity and apartheid contamination. The institute will be fixing that architectural design of the language,” she said.

She called on all private schools and universities to partner with Zula-Di to correct the language mistakes which are still being taught. “We are inviting those who want to be trainers to come to us, so they can also pass on the knowledge. We want to reconnect black people with their moral value system, as corruption is inconsistent with ubuntu philosophy which is about compassion and interdependence,” she said. Zulu-Dindi said Bantu-speaking citizens were being linguistically annihilated and were linguistically invisible.

She said, despite scientific studies pointing to the language barrier crisis as responsible for black African children’s poor performance in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) related fields, the pace of correcting the “fundamentally flawed colonial and apartheid grammar design for more than two-thirds of the South African population had been at a snail’s pace.

“Zula-Di will play a leading role in ensuring that all prescribed textbooks in KwaZulu-Natal are translated to isiZulu language.

We recognise the critical importance of English as an international language, hence it is established to ensure that Bantu language learners are fluent in their own mother tongue as well as the English language.”

SUNDAY TRIBUNE