BACKGROUND INFORMATION

The Research Unit for Experimental Phonology (RUEPUS) was founded June 1994. The Unit resides in the Department of African Languages and is funded by National Research Foundation (NRF) and the University of Stellenbosch.

Mission and Vision

The mission of RUEPUS may best be described as the active promotion of the official languages of South Africa at technological level through research, facilitation and development activities with an explicit focus on the African languages and the speakers of these languages.

The vision upheld by RUEPUS is that all languages spoken in South Africa, and more specifically the African languages, be developed at technological level to such an extent that

• they will meet the challenges of a technologically driven next millennium, i.e. that they may be implemented in language and speech based human-machine communication systems to the effect that mother tongue speakers may have access to information of any kind in the language of his/her own choice as well as in the mode (oral/visual/written) of his or her choice;
• a new generation of language engineers (i.e. mother tongue speakers with specific training in language and/or computer science and/or electronic engineering) will be created which will play a central role in the development of language based applications which will infiltrate all walks of life;
• a technology driven national resource facility making provision for at least speech corpora, will be put in place not only serving as a national archive documenting language and speech characteristics of all of the languages (and its dialects) at different points in time, but also to serve as a basis for the development electronic speech based systems for use in education, business and industry etc.

Methods

An investigation into the nature of the relationship between the phonological and phonetic aspects of speech communication necessitates an integrative approach between phonological theory and experimental phonetic techniques. The Research Unit is interdisciplinary by nature with links to linguistics, electronic engineering and computer science.

Last Updated: 30 September 2002

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