This paper introduces the first project of its kind within the Southern African language engineering context. It focuses on the role of idiosyncratic linguistic and pragmatic features of the different languages concerned and how these features are to be accommodated within (a) the creation of applicable speech corpora and (b) the design of the system at large. An introduction to the multilingual realities of South Africa and its implications for the development of databases is followed by a description of the system and different options that may be implemented in the system.

In this paper we intend to point out two common concepts in speech synthesis that we consider questionable, if not misguided and wrong. The first of these concepts is the treatment of phenomena in language and speech that are known or assumed to have low frequencies of occurrence. The second concept that we consider questionable is the notion of a "restricted" application domain. We conclude that word or syllable concatenation schemes are only feasible in strictly closed domains, i.e. those domains that have a fixed and unchanging vocabulary.

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