Everything about The Khoisan Languages totally explained
The
Khoisan languages (also
Khoesaan languages) are the indigenous languages of southern and eastern
Africa; in southern Africa their speakers are the
Khoi and
Bushmen (Saan), in east Africa the
Sandawe and
Hadza. They are famous for their
clicks. Many people were exposed to this group of languages through
Nǃxau's language in the
1980 film
The Gods Must Be Crazy.
Khoisan is the smallest
phylum of
African languages in
Greenberg's classification. However, the relationships among these languages remain a matter of debate among historical linguists, and the term "Khoisan" is often used for convenience without any implication of linguistic validity, much as are "
Papuan" and "
Australian". It may be that the Tuu and Juu (or Juu-ǂHoan) families are similar due to a southern African
Sprachbund rather than a genealogical relationship, whereas the Khoe (or Kwadi-Khoe) family is a more recent migrant to the area, and related instead to Sandawe in East Africa. No higher-level relationship has been demonstrated, and the putative branches of Khoisan are at best extremely distantly related.
Prior to the
Bantu expansion, it's likely that Khoisan languages, or languages like them, were spread throughout southern and eastern Africa. Today they're restricted to the
Kalahari Desert, primarily in
Namibia and
Botswana, and to the
Rift Valley in central
Tanzania.
Most Khoisan languages are
endangered, and several are
moribund or
extinct. Most have no written record. The only widespread Khoisan language is
Nama of Namibia, with a quarter of a million speakers;
Sandawe in Tanzania is second in number with about 40,000, some monolingual; and the
Juu language cluster of the northern Kalahari is spoken by some 30,000 people.
Khoisan languages are best known for their use of
click consonants as
phonemes. These are written with letters such as
ǃ and
ǂ. The
Juǀʼhoan language has some 30 click consonants, not counting clusters, among perhaps 90 phonemes, which include
strident and
pharyngealized vowels and four tones. The
ǃXóõ and
ǂHõã languages are similarly complex.
Grammatically, the southern Khoisan languages are generally fairly isolating, with word order being more widely used to indicate grammatical relations than is inflection. The languages of Tanzania have large numbers of inflectional suffixes.
Classification
Each of the first five headings listed below is a branch of the putative Khoisan phylum, but it isn't clear that they're related. The inclusion of Hadza in Khoisan is especially doubtful, and it appears to be a
language isolate.
See
Khoe languages for speculations on the linguistic history of the region.
- Hadza (975 speakers in Tanzania) Hadza appears to be unrelated to any other language; genetically, the Hadza people are unrelated to the Khoisan peoples of Southern Africa, and their closest relatives may be among the Pygmies of Central Africa.
- Sandawe (40,000 speakers in Tanzania) There is some indication that Sandawe may be related to the Khoe-Kwadi family, such as a congruent pronominal system and some good Swadesh-list matches, but not enough to establish regular sound correspondences. The Sandawe are not related to the Hadza, despite their proximity.
- Kwadi-Khoe
- Kwadi. Extinct, Angola. Although little data is available, proto-Kwadi-Khoe reconstructions have been made for pronouns and some basic vocabulary.
- The Khoe family is both the most numerous and diverse family of Khoisan languages, with seven living languages and over a quarter million speakers.
- Khoekhoe This branch appears to have been affected by the Juu-Tuu sprachbund.
- Nama (250,000 speakers. Ethnonyms Khoekhoen, Nama, Damara. A dialect cluster including ǂAakhoe and Haiǁom)
- Eini (Extinct.)
- South Khoekhoe
- Korana (Extinct.)
- Xiri (90 speakers. Moribund. A dialect cluster.)
- Tshu-Khwe (or Kalahari) Many of these languages have undergone partial click loss.
- East Tshu-Khwe (East Kalahari)
- Shua (6000 speakers. A dialect cluster including Deti, Tsʼixa, ǀXaise, and Ganádi)
- Tsoa (9300 speakers. A dialect cluster including Cire Cire and Kua)
- West Tshu-Khwe (West Kalahari)
- Kxoe (11,000 speakers. A dialect cluster including ǁAni and Buga)
- Naro (14,000 speakers. A dialect cluster.)
- Gǁana-Gǀwi (4500 speakers. A dialect cluster including Gǁana, Gǀwi, and ǂHaba)
- The Tuu family consists of two language clusters, which are related to each other at about the distance of Khoekhoe and Tshukhwe within Khoe. They are typologically very similar to the Juu languages (below), but have not been demonstrated to be related to them genealogically. (The similarities may be an areal feature.)
- Taʼa
- ǃKwi
- The Juu-ǂHoan family is a distant relationship, only recently proposed, that's being increasingly accepted.
- ǂHõã (200 speakers, Botswana. Moribund.)
- Juu (also ǃKung, formerly Northern Khoisan) is a single dialect cluster. (~45,000 speakers.) Well known dialects are ǃKung (ǃXũũ), Juǀʼhoan, and ǂKxʼauǁʼein.
- Other » A Haiǁom language is listed in most Khoisan references. A century ago the Haiǁom people spoke a Ju dialect, probably close to ǃKung, but they now speak a divergent dialect of Nama. Thus their language is variously said to be extinct or to have 16,000 speakers, to be Ju or to be Khoe. (Their numbers have been included under Nama above.) They are known as the Saa by the Nama, and this is the source of the word San.
Other "Click Languages"
Not all languages using clicks as phonemes are considered Khoisan. Most are neighboring
Bantu languages in southern Africa: the
Nguni languages Xhosa,
Zulu,
Swazi,
Phuthi, and
Ndebele;
Sotho;
Yeyi in
Botswana; and
Mbukushu,
Kwangali, and
Gciriku in the
Caprivi Strip; but there's also the
South Cushitic language
Dahalo in
Kenya, and an extinct northern
Australian ritual language called
Damin.
The Bantu languages adopted the use of clicks from neighboring, displaced, or absorbed Khoisan populations, often through intermarriage, while the Dahalo are thought to retain clicks from an earlier language when they
shifted to speaking a Cushitic language; if so, the pre-Dahalo language may have been something like Hadza or Sandawe. Damin is an invented ritual language, and has nothing to do with Khoisan.
Further Information
Get more info on 'Khoisan Languages'.
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