Kwadi language

Kwadi is a "click language" of uncertain classification once spoken in the southwest corner of Angola. It is believed to be extinct. There were only fifty Kwadi in the 1950s, of which only 4–5 were competent speakers of the language. Three partial speakers were known in 1965, but in 1981 no speakers could be found.

Because Kwadi is poorly recorded, there is not much evidence with which to classify it. It is sometimes classified as the most known divergent member of the Khoe family, or, equivalently, linked to the Khoe languages in a "Kwadi–Khoe" family, though this conclusion is disputed. Proponents say it appears to have preserved elements of proto-Khoe that were lost in the western Khoe languages under the influence of Juu languages in Botswana.^[1]

The Kwadi people, called Kwepe by the Bantu, appear to have been a remnant population of southwestern African hunter-gatherers, otherwise only represented by the Cimba, Kwisi, and the Damara, who adopted the Khoekhoe language. Like the Kwisi they were fishermen, on the lower reaches of the Coroca River.^[2]

Kwadi was alternatively known by variants of koroka (Ba-koroka, Curoca, Koroka, Ma-koroko, Mu-coroca), Cuanhoca, or Cuepe.

Dialect

• Zorotua (Va-sorontu)

See also

• Kwisi people

External links

• Ethnologue Report for Kwadi

References

1. ^ Changing profile when encroaching on hunter-gatherer territory?: towards a history of the Khoe–Kwadi family in southern Africa. Tom Güldemann, paper presented at the conference on Historical linguistics and hunter-gatherer populations in global perspective, at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Aug. 2006.
2. ^ Blench, Roger. 1999. "Are the African Pygmies an Ethnographic Fiction?". Pp 41–60 in Biesbrouck, Elders, & Rossel (eds.) Challenging Elusiveness: Central African Hunter-Gatherers in a Multidisciplinary Perspective. Leiden.[1]