Evaluating the Acceptance and Descriptive Usability of the Swahili Coined Terminologies: an Investigation of the ICT Terminologies

Abstract

This study aimed at evaluating the acceptance and descriptive usability of the Swahili ICT coined terminologies. Questionnaire, interview and focus group discussion are the tools used in collecting data for this study. The results show that the rate of acceptance and usability of the Swahili ICT coined terms is low where most of the respondents justified that they do not use the Swahili ICT coined terms/words in their daily communication. The study also found that there are different factors for acceptance and usability of the Swahili ICT coined terms which include;  lack of community involvement, lack of best strategies to promote the coined terms, coining process for Swahili ICT terms takes long time, presence of competing neologisms which confuse language users, complexity for the coined terms etc. With these findings, deliberate effort should be made to ensure that different factors should be considered in the process of coining different terms in order to avoid having many words which are not used in the daily communication.