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Languages in Africa

Google Books and African Languages

Google books has announced that it will be publishing books in a number of East African Languages.

We’ve always said that with Google Books we want to bring more books to more people in more languages. Today we’re truly delighted to announce that we’re making progress, and getting closer to making this true for more users in Africa. In a partnership with the East African Educational Publishers (EAEP) we’re working to bring more books in African languages to our index. From Swahili, to Kikuyu, to Dholua and Acholi, but also including oral languages such as Mbeere and Maasai, the thousands of titles published by EAEP will be digitized and indexed on Google’s search engine and become available to users in Kenya and around the world in the next several months.  (read more)

For some reason, publishing in East African languages seems to be more advanced than in the West. In Ivory Coast there was only one small publisher who printed material in local languages, and they only had a small selection.

Information from WhiteAfrican via Twitter.