The Ciyawo English Dictionary Project (CEDP) is a small dictionary project that aims to construct a bilingual learner dictionary in Ciyawo and English. Our main audience are final year Yawo primary and first year high school students, though we believe that the dictionary will also be a great help to cross-cultural workers who need to learn Ciyawo in order to communicate with people in their heart
language. We believe that this dictionary, once complete, will be of great assistance to Yawo children who require English for entrance into secondary education, yet who are severely disadvantaged by a dearth of published material in their language. The Yawo number more than 2 million people and currently live in Malawi, Mozambique and Tanzania. Unfortunately, they are one of the least educated groups in Malawi. One of the reasons for their low level of education is because they are disadvantaged when entering school as they don’t speak either of the languages which dominate the education system in Malawi, namely Chichewa and English. It is therefore our desire to help bridge this gap, in a small way, by providing a limited vocabulary dictionary in Ciyawo-English that will help Yawo children become familiar with the most important and frequently used words in these languages.
