We have created a spell checker for OpenOffice.org and now the Mozilla Firefox and Thunderbird products.  A spell checker is only as good as its underlying word list and language handling routines.  Every missing word you find could help make the spell checker better for everyone.

There are a number of levels on which you can engage - all are valuable, both to us and to your language.  In order of difficulty:

You'll probably start at one and slowly move your way up.

 

Adding missing words is as simple as adding them to your custom dictionary.  If it's an urgent addition send it straight to us.  But most are not that urgent.  So once in a while take your custom dictionary, review the words, check them against various Afrikaans dictionaries and send them to us for inclusion.

 

Correcting words is more time consuming, in that you need to go through the raw word list and check each for possible spelling mistakes.  Yes, a wordlist of over 170 000 words does have mistakes.  You might prefer to do this in conjunction with classifying the words into their different parts of speech or noun classes.  The last step is essential for enhanced spell checking.

 

Although not related to spell checking we should be able to hyphenate words correctly.  Testing and checking that we can hyphenate the whole wordlist correctly is an imporant step to validating that our hyphenation rules are good.

 

The last task - working on morphology - is the hardest.  But if the area of linguistics interests you then, as a first step, have a look at the hunspell spell checker and all of its features.  We would want to use or add some of those features to our spell checkers. 

 

If you read this far and suddenly felt daunted don't despair.  Simply adding new words and checking for errors in our current word list is a very very valuable contribution.