Language & communication

AAC in Afrikaans and Other Home Languages

VOIS Team · Updated 22 July 2026

Most AAC symbol libraries are built in English first, and everything else is an afterthought. The picture sets are English. The pre-recorded voices are English. If you want anything else, you're usually stuck typing translations into a settings menu and hoping the app's text-to-speech engine can pronounce your language properly — which, for Afrikaans and South Africa's other ten official languages, it very often can't.

That's a real problem, because an AAC system only works if it matches the language a child actually hears and is expected to use. A board full of English words doesn't help a child whose home is Afrikaans, isiZulu, Sesotho, or a mix of two or three languages depending on who's in the room. It doesn't teach them to ask their ouma for "koffie," or their gogo for "amanzi." It teaches them a version of communication that doesn't exist anywhere in their actual life.

Why "just translate the labels" doesn't fix it

The instinct is usually to type a translated word under each picture and move on. That solves half the problem at best. A written label helps an adult reading over a child's shoulder, but it does nothing for the child if the app then reads that label aloud in a flat, mispronounced, machine-generated voice — or doesn't read it aloud at all. For a child who is building spoken or vocalised communication, what they hear matters as much as what they see.

The other half of the problem is the pictures themselves. Generic symbol libraries are drawn for a generic, usually Northern-Hemisphere household. A cartoon icon for "bread" doesn't look like the loaf on your kitchen counter. A stock photo of a bathroom doesn't look like your bathroom. Kids learn faster from things they recognise, and recognition is personal, not generic.

How VOIS handles this differently

VOIS was built around two decisions that speak directly to this: every card uses a real photo you take yourself, and every voice is recorded by an actual person speaking the actual word — in whatever language that word belongs to.

• Record in any language, on any card. There's no language setting to configure and no list of "supported" languages to check first. If you can say the word, you can record it. A family that mixes Afrikaans and English at home can record cards in both, side by side, exactly the way the household actually talks.
• Real photos instead of symbol libraries. A card for "eat" can be a photo of your child's actual plate. A card for a family member can be their actual face, not a generic icon of a person. That's not just nicer to look at — it's faster for a child to learn, because they're not translating a symbol into a concept and then into a word. The photo already is the thing.
• Multiple voices per child. Different people in a child's life can record the same card in their own voice — a parent's "ja" sounds like a parent, a grandparent's sounds like a grandparent. That matters more than it might seem: a familiar voice is part of what makes a word feel real and usable, not just correct.

Setting it up for a multilingual household

If your family moves between languages the way most South African households do, a few practical habits make this work well:

• Record the words your child hears most often in each context — home, school, therapy — rather than trying to build a "complete" set in every language on day one. A smaller board that matches real life beats a large one that doesn't.
• Let more than one person record. If a gogo, ouma, or teacher is part of a child's daily routine, their recorded voice on the relevant cards keeps the board consistent with who the child is actually talking to.
• Don't worry about keeping languages "separate." Real households code-switch constantly, and a board that reflects that is more useful than one that artificially sorts words into tidy language columns.

None of this needs to be perfect from the first day. The point of a communication board is that it grows and changes as your child does — and it should sound like your family while it does.