| Khoisan | |
|---|---|
| Khoesaan | |
| Geographic distribution: |
Kalahari Desert, central Tanzania |
| Linguistic classification: | (term of convenience) |
| Subdivisions: | |
| ISO 639-2 and 639-5: | khi |
Map showing the distribution of the Khoisan languages (yellow)
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The Khoisan languages (also known as the Khoesan or Khoesaan languages) are the click languages of Africa which do not belong to other language families. They were once thought to form a language family, but this is no longer generally accepted, and has become a minority position among linguists. Khoisan languages include languages indigenous to southern and eastern Africa, though some, such as the Khoi languages, appear to have moved to their current locations not long before the Bantu expansion.[1] In southern Africa, their speakers are the Khoi and Bushmen (Saan), in east Africa the Sandawe and Hadza.
Prior to the Bantu expansion, it is likely that Khoisan languages, or languages like them, were spread throughout southern and eastern Africa. They are currently restricted to the Kalahari Desert, primarily in Namibia and Botswana, and to the Rift Valley in central Tanzania.[2]
Most of the languages are endangered, and several are moribund or extinct. Most have no written record. The only widespread Khoisan language is Khoekhoe ("Nàmá") 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 typically 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. By contrast, the languages of Tanzania have large numbers of inflectional suffixes.
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Khoisan was proposed as one of the four families of African languages in Greenberg's classification (1949–1954, revised in 1963). However, few linguists who now study Khoisan languages accept 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.[3][4] It has been suggested that the similarities of the Tuu and Juu (or Kx'a) families are due to a southern African Sprachbund 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.[1]
E.O.J. 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-criterion typology: the presence of clicks.[5] Dimmendaal (2008) summarized the general view with, "it 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). Linguists who continue to accept Khoisan include Christopher Ehret (1986, 2003), Henry Honken (1988, 1998), and George Starostin (2003, 2008).
The putative branches of Khoisan are often considered independent families, in the absence of a demonstration that they are related according to the standard comparative method.
See Khoe languages for speculations on the linguistic history of the region.
With about 800 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.
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 good Swadesh-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 data is available, proto-Kwadi–Khoe reconstructions have been made for pronouns and some basic vocabulary. However, the Kwadi connection is not accepted by all Khoesanists.
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 18,000 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.
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).
The Kx'a family is a distant relationship formally proposed in 2010.
Not all languages using clicks as phonemes are considered Khoisan. Most others are neighboring Bantu languages in southern Africa: the Nguni languages (Xhosa, Zulu, Swazi, Phuthi, and Northern Ndebele); Sotho; Yeyi in Botswana; and Mbukushu, Kwangali, and Gciriku in the Caprivi Strip. Of these, Xhosa, Zulu, and Yeyi have intricate systems of click consonants; the others, despite the click in the name Gciriku, more rudimentary ones. There is also the South Cushitic language Dahalo in Kenya, which has dental clicks in a few score words, and an extinct northern Australian ritual language called Damin, which had only nasal clicks.
The Bantu languages adopted the use of clicks from neighboring, displaced, or absorbed Khoisan populations, often through intermarriage, while the Dahalo are thought to have retained 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.
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