The Lemmatisation of Nouns in Tshivenda Dictionaries

Abstract

Tshivenda is one of the official languages of South Africa, mostly spoken in Limpopo Province at Vhembe District. From 1994, when the Republic of South Africa became a democratic government, speakers of the Tshivenda language spread to all nine provinces of South Africa. Tshivenda has different word categories, like nouns, verbs, adjectives and many more. When words are looked up in dictionaries, one should know what types of categories are given, e.g. their spelling, pronunciation and meaning. If this is not clearly represented one would not be able to use such a dictionary. This paper seeks to investigate how nouns are lemmatised in Tshivenda dictionaries. Attention is given to word and stem lemmatisation. It also looks at the lemmatisation of singular and plural nouns, and the lemmatisation of deverbative and diminutive nouns. This will be accomplished by analysing published Tshivenda dictionaries in circulation.