It is well documented that despite being elevated to official language level, African languages are still marginalized as colonial languages seem to be dominant in education. Furthermore, African languages are lagging in terms of their integration in digital space. While the integration of technology in teaching African languages may alleviate some of these issues, research on affordances of technology that facilitate effective learning in African languages is currently limited. To address this, this scoping review investigates the challenges in teaching African languages in digital age. Our contention is that currently, African languages are not in line with the contemporary methods in the digital era. Against this backdrop, this study underscores that the use of digital platforms is a transformative agenda which will ensure that South Africa meets the 2030 United Nations Sustainable Development Goal number 4, whose primary goal is to provide quality inclusive education by integrating ICT in teaching African languages. This qualitative study is framed theoretically by Unified Theory for Acceptance and Inclusive education frameworks to identify current gaps in teaching African languages in institutions of higher meaning in South Africa, thus, to advocate for integration of technology in their teaching. It is important to develop digital literacy in African languages, so that they are at par with colonial languages, thus making them relevant in the 21st century. We conducted a scoping review of literature on pedagogical practices prevalent in teaching African Languages in multilingual classrooms in South Africa. Our contention is that the topic under discussion has not yet been comprehensively reviewed, hence the choice for a scoping review. We first established the parameters of the study, and this was followed by identifying the information sources that we would use. A thorough in-depth review of academic publications from credible sources such as Scopus and Google Scholar were conducted to identify research gap in the integration of technology in teaching African languages, thus, we make recommendations for future research. The key words that we used to identify the relevant literature to review include teaching African languages in higher education, challenges facing integration of technology in teaching African languages, the state of African languages in South Africa and our focus was on studies published between 2019 and 2025. The reviewed literature revealed challenges such as lack of terminology and lack of proper e-learning framework for African languages. Lack of terminology poses several threats to the speakers of the languages, and the implication therefore is that universities fail to meet the needs of the diverse linguistic learner population. We recommend that universities must first work towards the intellectualization of the languages through terminology development. This will benefit students to achieve success in their learning as they will have access to academic resources in their own languages. We argue that the immediate need for terminology development will accelerate the process to digitalize African languages so that they can be relevant and widely available globally. Our conclusion is that further research must look at the status of the technology affordances used towards digitalizing African languages in South Africa, unpacking the lessons learnt and opportunities.

Keywords: African languages, digitalizing, intellectualization, digital literacy, technological affordances, ICT affordances.