All but two Khoisan languages are indigenous to southern Africa; these are classified into three language families. TheKhoe family appears to have migrated to southern Africa not long before theBantu expansion.[3] Ethnically, their speakers are theKhoekhoe and theSan (Bushmen). Two languages of eastern Africa, those of theSandawe andHadza, were originally also classified as Khoisan, although their speakers are ethnically neither Khoekhoe nor San.
Before the Bantu expansion, Khoisan languages, or languages like them, were likely spread throughout southern and eastern Africa. They are currently restricted to theKalahari Desert, primarily inNamibia andBotswana, and to theRift Valley in centralTanzania.[2]
Most of the languages areendangered, and several aremoribund orextinct. Most have no written record. The only widespread Khoisan language isKhoekhoe (also known as Khoekhoegowab, Nàmá or Damara) of Namibia, Botswana and South Africa, with a quarter of a million speakers;Sandawe in Tanzania is second in number with some 40–80,000, some monolingual; and theǃKung language of the northern Kalahari spoken by some 16,000 or so people. Language use is quite strong among the 20,000 speakers ofNaro, half of whom speak it as a second language.
Khoisan languages are best known for their use ofclick consonants asphonemes. These are typically written with characters such asǃ andǂ. Clicks are quite versatile as consonants, as they involve two articulations of the tongue which can operate partially independently. Consequently, the languages with the greatest numbers of consonants in the world are Khoisan. TheJuǀʼhoan language has 48 click consonants among nearly as many non-click consonants,strident andpharyngealized vowels, and four tones. TheǃXóõ andǂHõã languages are even more complex.
Khoisan was proposed as one of the four families ofAfrican languages inJoseph Greenberg's classification (1949–1954, revised in 1963). However, linguists who study Khoisan languages reject their unity, and the name "Khoisan" is used by them as a term of convenience without any implication of linguistic validity, much as "Papuan" and "Australian" are.[4][5] It has been suggested that the similarities of the Tuu and Kxʼa families are due to a southern AfricanSprachbund rather than a genealogical relationship, whereas the Khoe (or perhaps Kwadi–Khoe) family is a more recent migrant to the area, and may be related to Sandawe in East Africa.[3]
Ernst Oswald Johannes Westphal is known for his early rejection of the Khoisan language family (Starostin 2003). Bonny Sands (1998) concluded that the family is not demonstrable with current evidence.Anthony Traill at first accepted Khoisan (Traill 1986), but by 1998 concluded that it could not be demonstrated with current data and methods, rejecting it as based on a single typological criterion: the presence of clicks.[6] Dimmendaal (2008) summarized the general view thus: "[I]t has to be concluded that Greenberg's intuitions on the genetic unity of Khoisan could not be confirmed by subsequent research. Today, the few scholars working on these languages treat the three [southern groups] as independent language families that cannot or can no longer be shown to be genetically related" (p. 841). Starostin (2013) accepts a relationship between Sandawe and Khoi is plausible, as is one between Tuu and Kxʼa, but sees no indication of a relationship between Sandawe and Khoi on the one hand and Tuu and Kxʼa on the other, or between any of them and Hadza.
Janina Brutt-Griffler writes: "Given that such colonial borders were generally arbitrarily drawn, they grouped large numbers of ethnic groups that spoke many languages." She hypothesizes that this took place within efforts to prevent the spread of English during European colonization and prevent the entrance of the majority into the middle class.[7]
Anthony Traill noted the Khoisan languages' extreme variation.[8] Despite their shared clicks, the Khoisan languages diverge significantly from each other.Traill demonstrated this linguistic diversity in the data presented in the below table. The first two columns include words from the two Khoisanlanguage isolates,Sandawe andHadza. The following three are languages from theKhoe family, theKxʼa family, and theTuu family, respectively.
Khoisan language words, as reported in 2005 by Britannica[8]
Present distribution of speakers of Khoisan languages
The branches that were once considered part of so-called Khoisan are now considered independent families, since it has not been demonstrated that they are related according to thestandard comparative method.
SeeKhoe languages for speculations on the linguistic history of the region.
With about 800 speakers in Tanzania, Hadza is no longer seen as a Khoisan language and 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 thePygmies of Central Africa.
There is some indication that Sandawe (about 40,000 speakers in Tanzania) may be related to the Khoe family, such as a congruent pronominal system and some goodSwadesh-list matches, but not enough to establish regular sound correspondences. Sandawe is not related to Hadza, despite their proximity.
The Khoe family is both the most numerous and diverse family of Khoisan languages, with seven living languages and over a quarter million speakers. Although little Kwadi data is available, proto-Khoe–Kwadi reconstructions have been made for pronouns and some basic vocabulary.
Gǁana–Gǀwi (a dialect cluster includingGǁana andGǀwi)
AHaiǁom 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 18,000 speakers, to be Ju or to be Khoe. (Their numbers have been included under Nama above.) They are known as theSaa by the Nama, and this is the source of the wordSan.
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 Kxʼa languages (below), but have not been demonstrated to be related to them genealogically (the similarities may be anareal feature).
Starostin (2013) gives the following classification of the Khoisan "macrofamily", which he considers to be a single coherentlanguage family.[10] However, this classification is not widely accepted.
Not all languages using clicks as phonemes are considered Khoisan. Most others are neighboringBantu languages in southern Africa: theNguni languages (Xhosa,Zulu,Swazi,Phuthi, andNorthern Ndebele);Sotho;Yeyi inBotswana; andMbukushu,Kwangali, andGciriku in theCaprivi Strip. Clicks are spreading to a few additional neighboring languages. Of these languages, Xhosa, Zulu, Ndebele and Yeyi have intricate systems of click consonants; the others, despite the click in the nameGciriku, more rudimentary ones. There is also theSouth Cushitic languageDahalo inKenya, which has dental clicks in a few score words, and an extinct and presumablyconstructedAboriginal Australian ritual language calledDamin, which had only nasal clicks.
The Bantu languages adopted the use of clicks from neighboring, displaced, or absorbed Khoisan populations (or from other Bantu languages), often through intermarriage, while the Dahalo are thought to have retained clicks from an earlier language when theyshifted 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.
These are the only languages known to have clicks in normal vocabulary. Occasionally other languages are said by laypeople to have "click" sounds. This is usually a misnomer forejective consonants, which are found across much of the world, or is a reference toparalinguistic use of clicks such as Englishtsk! tsk!
^Greenberg, Joseph H. 1955. ''Studies in African Linguistic Classification.'' New Haven: Compass Publishing Company. (Reprints, with minor corrections, a series of eight articles published in the ''Southwestern Journal of Anthropology'' from 1949 to 1954.)
^Brutt-Griffler, Janina (2006). "Language endangerment, the construction of indigenous languages and world English". In Fishman, Joshua A. (ed.).'Along the Routes to Power' Explorations of Empowerment through Language. Mouton de Gruyter.
^abTraill, Anthony."Khoisan languages".Encyclopædia Britannica. Encyclopædia Britannica, inc. RetrievedJune 10, 2017.
^abVoßen, Rainer. 1997.Die Khoe-Sprachen: Ein Beitrag zur Erforschung der Sprachgeschichte Afrikas (Quellen zur Khoisan-Forschung 12). Cologne: Rüdiger Köppe.
^Baucom, Kenneth L. 1974. Proto-Central-Khoisan. In Voeltz, Erhard Friedrich Karl (ed.),Proceedings of the 3rd annual conference on African linguistics, 7–8 April 1972, 3-37. Bloomington: Research Institute for Inner Asian Studies, Indiana University.
^Güldemann, Tom. 2005. ‘“Tuu”: A New Name for the Southern Khoisan Family’, in Tom Güldemann (ed.),Studies in Tuu (Southern Khoisan). University of Leipzig Papers on Africa, Languages and Literatures, 23 (Leipzig: Institut für Afrikanistik, University of Leipzig), pp. 2–9.
^Snyman, Jan Winston. 1997. A preliminary classification of the ǃXũũ and Žuǀ'hõasi dialects. In Haacke, Wilfrid and Elderkin, Edward Derek (eds.),Namibian languages: reports and papers, 21-106. Köln: Rüdiger Köppe Verlag; University of Namibia (UNAM).
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Ehret, Christopher (2003). Bengtson, John D.; Starostin, George (eds.)."Toward reconstructing Proto-South Khoisan".Mother Tongue: Journal of the Association for the Study of Language in Prehistory.VIII (Special Issue: Proceedings of the Linguistic Databases and Linguistic Taxonomy Workshop, Santa Fe Institute, January 6-10, 2003):63–80.
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