Traditional Readability Approaches in Sesotho and isiZulu

A (First) Overview

Abstract

This paper presents a conceptual overview of traditional readability metrics adapted for two South African Indigenous languages, isiZulu and Sesotho, which differ orthographically with conjunctive and  disjunctive writing systems, respectively. Both languages are low-resource, lacking extensive corpora, lexicons, and pretrained models necessary for automatic readability assessment. By critically examining these adaptations, we highlight the challenges of applying English-based metrics to morphologically complex African languages and emphasise the need for language-specific digital resources that reflect local linguistic structures. Our work aligns with ongoing efforts to develop and enhance language resources for under-resourced African Indigenous languages, thereby supporting their evolving presence and accessibility in the digital age, including contexts shaped by large language models.