This presentation introduces the imminent establishment of a new language resource infrastructure focusing on languages spoken in Southern Africa, with an eventual aim to become a hub for digital language resources within Sub-Saharan Africa. The Constitution of South Africa makes provision for 11 official languages all with equal status. The current language Resource Management Agency will be merged with the new Centre, which will have a wider focus than that of data acquisition, management and distribution. The Centre will entertain two main programs: Digitisation and Digital Humanities. The digitisation program will focus on the systematic digitisation of relevant text, speech and multi-modal data across the official languages. Relevancy will be determined by a Scientific Advisory Board. This will take place on a continuous basis through specified projects allocated to national members of the Centre, as well as through open-calls aimed at the academic as well as local communities. The digital resources will be managed and distributed through a dedicated web-based portal. The development of the Digital Humanities program will entail extensive academic support for projects implementing digital language based data. The Centre will function as an enabling research infrastructure primarily supported by national government and hosted by the North-West University.

The management of language resources requires several legal aspects to be taken into consideration. In this paper we discuss a number of these aspects which lead towards the formation of a legal framework for a language resources management agency. The legal framework entails examination of; the agency's stakeholders and the relationships that exist amongst them, the privacy and intellectual property rights that exist around the language resources offered by the agency, and the external (e.g. laws, acts, policies) and internal legal instruments (e.g. end user licence agreements) required for the agency's operation.

This presentation and accompanying demonstration focuses on the development of a mobile platform for e-learning purposes with enhanced text-to-speech capabilities. It reports on an international consortium project entitled Mobile E-learning for Africa (MELFA), which includes a reading and literacy training component, particularly focusing on an African language, isiXhosa. The high penetration rate of mobile phones within the African continent has created new opportunities for delivering various kinds of information, including e-learning material to communities that have not had appropriate infrastructures. Aspects of the mobile platform development are described paying attention to basic functionalities of the user interface, as well as to the underlying web technologies involved. Some of the main features of the literacy training module are described, such as grapheme-sound correspondence, syllabification-sound relationships, varying tempo of presentation. A particular point is made for using HMM (HTS) synthesis in this case, as it seems to be very appropriate for less resourced languages.