Kwisi people

Kwisi
Mbundyu, Kwandu
Native to Angola
Region southern coast
Extinct ca. 1970?
Language codes
ISO 639-3 None (mis)
Glottolog kwis1235[1]
R.102[2]

The Kwisi are a seashore-fishing and hunter-gatherer people of southwest Angola that physically seem to be a remnant of an indigenous population—along with the Kwadi, the Cimba, and the Damara—that are unlike either the San (Bushmen) or the Bantu. Culturally they have been strongly influenced by the Kuvale, and speak the Kuvale dialect of Herero.[3][4] There may, however, have been a few elderly speakers of an unattested Kwisi language (AKA Kwisi, Mbundyu, Kwandu) in the 1960s.[5]

References

  1. Nordhoff, Sebastian; Hammarström, Harald; Forkel, Robert; Haspelmath, Martin, eds. (2013). "Kwisi". Glottolog. Leipzig: Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology.
  2. Jouni Filip Maho, 2009. New Updated Guthrie List Online
  3. 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.
  4. Alan Barnard, 1992. The Hunters and herders of southern Africa.
  5. Matthias Brenzinger, 1992. Language death: factual and theoretical explorations with special reference to East Africa, p. 367.