Khoisan languages
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The Khoisan or Khoesaan languages compose the smallest and least well supported phylum of African languages. Historically, they were mainly spoken by the Khoisan (Khoi and Bushmen or San) people. Today they are only spoken in the Kalahari Desert in southwestern Africa, and in a small area in Tanzania. The only widespread Khoisan language is Nama, with a quarter million speakers; Sandawe is second in number with about 40,000, some monolingual; and the Ju language cluster has some 30,000 speakers total. Many of the other languages are becoming increasingly rare or moribund, and several are known to have become extinct. Most have no written record. The Hadza and Sandawe languages of Tanzania are generally classified as Khoisan, but all of the branches are at best extremely distant linguistically. Khoisanists (linguists who study Khoisan languages) regard the Khoisan hypothesis as undemonstrated, and classify these languages into anywhere from four to seven independent language families.
Khoisan languages are most famous for the use of click consonants as phonemes. The Ju/'hoan language has some 30 click consonants (not counting clusters) and perhaps 90 separate phonemes, including strident and pharyngealized vowels and 4 tones. The !Xóõ and ‡Hõã languages are similarly complex. Many people were exposed to this group of languages through Nǃxau's language in the 1980 film The Gods Must Be Crazy.
The only other languages using clicks as phonemes are neighboring Bantu languages in southern Africa, such as Xhosa, Zulu, and Sesotho; the South Cushitic language Dahalo in Kenya, and an extinct Australian Aborigine ceremonial language called Damin. The Bantu languages adopted the use of clicks from neighboring Khoisan populations, often through intermarriage, while the Dahalo are thought to have retained clicks from an earlier Khoisan-like language when they shifted to speaking a Cushitic language.
Grammatically, the Khoisan languages are generally fairly isolating. Suffixes are often used, but word order is overall more widely used than inflection.
See also
- List of Khoisan languages
- Khoe languages
- Tuu languages
- Ju languages
- ‡Hõã language
- Sandawe language
- Hadza language
Bibliography
- Köhler, O. (1971) 'Die Khoe-sprachigen Buschmänner der Kalahari', Forschungen zur allgemeinen und regionalen Geschichte. (Festschrift Kurt Kayser). Wiesbaden: F. Steiner, 373–411.
- Treis, Yvonne (1998) 'Names of Khoisan languages and their variants', in Schladt, Matthias (ed.) Language, Identity, and Conceptualization among the Khoisan. Köln: Rüdiger Köppe, 463–503.
- Vossen, Rainer (1997) Die Khoe-Sprachen. Ein Beitrag zur Erforschung der Sprachgeschichte Afrikas. Köln: Rüdiger Köppe.
- Westphal, E.O.J. (1971) 'The click languages of Southern and Eastern Africa', in Sebeok, T.A. (ed.) Current trends in Linguistics Vol. 7: Linguistics in Sub-Saharan Africa. Berlin: Mouton, 367–420.
- Winter, J.C. (1981) 'Die Khoisan-Familie'. In Heine, Bernd, Schadeberg Thilo C. & Wolff, Ekkehard (eds.) Die Sprachen Afrikas. Hamburg: Helmut Buske, 329–374.
External links
- Khoisan language family tree (considered unreliable by Khoisanists; see List of Khoisan languages)
- Khoisan linguistics at Cornell University
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