Kolokwa

Kolokwa turns English into written Kolokwa on your phone, for free.

Kolokwa is the language most of Liberia actually speaks — around five
million people — and until recently it had no agreed way of being written down.
This app writes it using Kolokwa Orthography v1.0, developed by Philip
Kaleewoun and Dr. John Victor Singler.

COMPLETELY OFFLINE
The whole orthography is built into the app. Translation is computed on your
device, so it works offline on a plane, in a village with no signal, and on a
phone with no data plan. Nothing you type is sent anywhere just because you
typed it.

SEE WHY, NOT JUST WHAT
Tap any word in a translation and the app shows you how that spelling was
reached, citing the numbered section of the orthography that decided it — the
vowel chart, the consonant rules, the rules that end a syllable in a vowel, the
fact that Kolokwa does not write the present tense of "to be" at all. It is a
translator that shows its work, which makes it a way to learn the writing
system rather than only to use it.

HONEST ABOUT WHAT IT DOES NOT KNOW
The orthography settles a fixed list of words. For anything outside that list
the app derives a spelling from the same published rules and marks it clearly
as a best guess, with a dotted underline and a plain-language note. An
approximation is never presented as a settled spelling, and the app reports
the words it had to guess because the orthography hasn't been finalized.

ALSO IN THE APP
- Your recent translations, kept on the device and never sent anywhere
- Copy to the clipboard, or share a translation as an image card
- Dark mode, larger text sizes, and full screen-reader support
- No account, no sign-up, no advertising, no analytics

A PROJECT OF THE PALAVA HUT FOUNDATION
The Palava Hut Foundation is a nonprofit building the first comprehensive
digital archive of Liberia's languages. Kolokwa is phase one; the work ahead
covers all sixteen of Liberia's indigenous languages through paid community
participation. Corrections raised in this app feed back into the orthography
itself.

Orthography v1.0 is partially frozen — a few questions are still open, and the
app says so where it matters rather than pretending otherwise.