Naming all the creatures and plants in nature is no small task. Fortunate Phaka is a zoologist who has conducted the first comprehensive analysis of naming and classification of frogs and reptiles in nine South African cultures. The list includes 136 frog and 407 reptile species that have been scientifically described. He explains why it’s important to record all the species names that people use in their own languages.
Why did you study the indigenous names of frogs and reptiles?
I am interested in the interactions between wildlife and people. These interactions include, for example, how people use wildlife in figures of speech, harvesting of wildlife for consumption, and of course how animals are assigned names.
If everyone’s names for things are known and shared, the ideas behind the names can also be shared, appreciated and valued.
Conservation planning is improved by consideration of different wildlife perspectives, which is revealed partly by the names that different people give wildlife.
Knowing local names can provide assurance that people from different cultural backgrounds are talking about the same species.
In South Africa, for example, there are 11 official spoken languages and scientists use Latin names for species. Most people aren’t familiar with the scientific names.
That’s why we extended the list of scientific, Afrikaans and English names of South African frogs and reptiles to include names in the country’s other nine official languages.
How did you go about it, and what did you find?
The project started as a pilot study in 2016, carried out in the Zululand area of South Africa’s KwaZulu-Natal province, where frog biodiversity is high and Indigenous cultural practices are still part of everyday life. Results of the pilot were published as a book in 2017 and as a scientific publication in 2019.
Following the success of the pilot study, I collected responses from 287 South African Indigenous language speakers (aged between 25 and 57) using an online questionnaire and in-person interviews while on field trips, and reviewed 18 scientific articles, dissertations and books to study naming practices even further.
The study shed light on the way people group animals (folk taxonomy) and how that compares with the way scientists group them (scientific taxonomy).
It became clear that Indigenous language names were often assigned based on unique features of frogs or reptiles, such as the sound they make, how they move or where they are found. Most of these names group several species together based on their similarities. This meant most frog and reptile species did not have Indigenous language names that were unique to them. For example, zoologists have named eight different Reed Frog species from South Africa but these eight species were assigned one Indigenous name that groups them together.
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The organised way of assigning Indigenous names to animals has some similarities to how scientists assign names that are unique to each species. For example, the Grass Frog species are grouped together under the scientific genus Ptychadena, and in IsiZulu the same species are grouped under the name Uvete. These similarities meant we could combine scientific naming practices with Indigenous naming practices to give each species a unique name in multiple languages.
To ensure the unique Indigenous names remained familiar to speakers of respective languages, we added descriptive terms to the existing general Indigenous names to make them specific, instead of coining an entirely new name. For example in IsiZulu the general name Umgqagqa (used for all Reed Frogs) became Umgqagqa opendiwe (specific name for the Painted Reed Frog). And several other descriptive terms were added to Umgqagqa to distinguish between the eight Reed Frog species of South Africa.
Why does it matter to record the Indigenous names of species?
Conservation hasn’t been doing a good job of being inclusive. Knowing Indigenous names and the local perspectives behind those names is a good way to start being aware of the multiple other perspectives. Conservation should ultimately be to everyone’s benefit.
For a long time wildlife guidebooks have had very few Indigenous language names in them. With increased recording of Indigenous names, any South African would be able to open a wildlife guide and read a name in any of our 11 official spoken languages. Hopefully one day we can have more books like the Bilingual Guide to the Frogs of Zululand (IsiZulu version: Isiqondiso Sasefilidini Esindimimbili Ngamaxoxo AkwelaKwaZulu) that make it possible for you to read about your favourite wildlife in your preferred language.
Has this been done for other groups of animals or plants?
Birds and plants are two groups that have received this kind of attention.
A recent scientific publication has worked on IsiZulu names for all South African birds and another publication studied the morphology of IsiZulu bird names. There has also been work on IsiXhosa insect names, and there has been a SeSotho animal word list published online. Indigenous names for African wildlife have received sporadic attention in the past, but with the recent increases in calls for consideration of Indigenous knowledge there has been increasing focus on understanding these names and using them.
Do you have some favourite names?
I have a lot of favourites but there are some names that stand out, like Senana (Sepedi general name for Rain Frogs) and Lebololo (Sepedi name for Puff adder). These names have the same root word or sound throughout most of the Indigenous South African languages and I am curious about how this happened. Rain Frogs are also called Senanatswidi in Sepedi and tswidi is an onomatopoeic reference to the whistling sound that Rain Frogs make.
Fortunate Mafeta Phaka receives funding from National Research Foundation/South African Institute for Aquatic Biodiversity.
