This is the preface for the conference of the Digital Humanities Association of Southern Africa (DHASA2025), which took place from the 10-14 November 2025.

IsiZulu and Siswati are closely related languages that share significant morphosyntactic characteristics. Systematic differences between these languages have been identified at the phonological and morphosyntactic levels. Due to the resource-scarce status of these languages, this similarity has led to bootstrapping of computational language resources at the morphological and syntactic levels. In this work, we investigate the feasibility of adapting lexical items in a computational lexicon from isiZulu to Siswati. We use Grammatical Framework resource grammars for both languages to analyse and transform lexical items, which are then evaluated against a parallel term list. An iterative process yields a success rate of 70.5 %, indicating that this approach is largely viable as a means of significantly reducing the manual effort needed to develop lexicons for computational resources for Siswati.

While text-to-speech technologies have made significant advances in recent years, questions remain about how synthesised speech is accepted in culturally and linguistically diverse settings such as South Africa. This study explores how South Africans perceive synthetic speech in comparison to human-recorded speech across three official languages: Afrikaans, isiZulu, and Sepedi, with healthcare as the application context. Using a blind and randomised listening test, 65 participants rated audio prompts across four acceptance metrics: trust, knowledgeability, lik ability, and relatability. Statistical analysis using the Wilcoxon signed-rank test revealed no significant difference between natural and syn thesised speech perception among Afrikaans speakers. However, low participation rates prevented meaningful analysis of speech percep tion for isiZulu and Sepedi speakers. When combining data from all participants, a medium effect size favouring natural speech was ob served, though this difference was not statistically significant. These findings suggest that synthetic speech adapted from natural recordings may be suit able for certain applications in South Africa, though larger and more linguistically represen tative samples are needed to confirm these results.

South Africa is facing a literacy crisis, with the latest PIRLS results showing that 8 out of 10 learners cannot read for basic comprehension by the time they leave the foundation phase. In this climate, the development of strategies to assist educators in harnessing the available resources to maximum effect is needed. However, most teaching resources are not digitally available, and even fewer are available in formats that make them readily available for use in natural language applications.
The Ngiyaqonda! project aims to provide an interactive, multimodal digital environment within which learners can practise their reading and writing skills. Computational grammars and speech technology are combined in a mobile application to facilitate the transition from oral competency in a language to written competency. In this paper, we show how words from a multilingual dictionary for foundation phase learners can be brought to digital life within the Ngiyaqonda! application to enhance the learning experience of core concepts and vocabulary.
We use the official foundation phase CAPS English-isiZulu dictionary (Mbatha et al. 2018) to ensure that the content of the computational grammars is aligned with relevant learning outcomes. The result is a fully parallel, multilingual computational grammar that is aligned at the semantic level, ready to be included in the Ngiyaqonda! application.