Classification of the Khoisan languages
- Key People:
- Wilhelm Bleek
A traditional linguistic classification of the Southern African Khoisan languages divides them into three effectively unrelated groups: Northern, Central, and Southern. Sandawe of Tanzania has a distant relationship to the Central group, but the place of Hadza even in relation to Sandawe has always been unclear; and the status of Kwadi, an extinct language of Namibe (formerly Moçâmedes) in southwestern Angola, remains uncertain. Kwadi may be very distantly related to the Khoe group. Within each group one finds more or less closely related languages and dialects with distinctive grammatical or lexical features, but between groups there are pronounced linguistic differences. In a more refined subdivision of the languages, the geographic adjectives are replaced by the names for ‘person’ in each major cluster of languages, so that Ju replaces Northern, Khoe replaces Central, and !Kwi and Taa expand Southern.
The Ju dialects !Xũ, Ju | hoã, and ǂKx’au ǁ ’eĩ are spoken by about 11,000 people mainly in northeastern Namibia and adjacent parts of Ngamiland in Botswana; there also may be a few speakers in southern Angola. The Khoe languages—notably the Khoekhoe group, consisting of Nama (officially called Khoekhoegowab) of Namibia, with about 230,000 speakers, and !Ora and Gri (both extinct) of South Africa—are the most numerous. The majority of the remaining Khoe languages and dialects of the Non-Khoekhoe (NKK) group, which altogether comprise about 66,000 speakers, are found over the whole of western, central, and northern Botswana. Of the so-called Western NKK languages, Naro is spoken in the west (with a few speakers in adjacent parts of Namibia), | Gui and ǁGana are spoken in the west-central area, and Buga and ǁAni are spoken to the north in the Okavango delta. (Kxoe, which is closely related to the latter, is found in the Caprivi Strip, Namibia, and along the Kwando River in southeastern Angola.) The Shua and Tshua groups of languages are spoken in the eastern parts of Botswana. The Taa dialects of the Southern group, consisting of closely related varieties of !Xóõ, are spoken by fewer than 2,500 people in southwestern Botswana (click for an audio clip of the !Xóõ language). The extinct !Kwi dialects of the Southern group, such as | Xam, ǁXegwi, ǁNg, and |’Auni, were spoken in South Africa; of the !Kwi dialects, only ǂKhomani is still spoken, by a few individuals in Northern Cape province (click for an audio clip of the ǂKhomani language). ǂΗuã, a language of southeastern Botswana with fewer than 100 speakers, shares features with both the Southern and the Ju groups. In East Africa, Sandawe is spoken by 70,000 people in Tanzania northwest of Dodoma, and Hadza is spoken by some 800 in north-central Tanzania near Lake Eyasi. Click for an audio clip of the | Gui language and for a clip of Ju.
The hypothesis of a genetic relationship between all these languages leads to the postulation of a Macro-Khoisan family represented in the form of the family tree. The dotted line connecting Hadza to the root reflects uncertainty about its membership in the family, and the alignment of Sandawe’s and Kwadi’s separate branches alongside the Khoe group posits a possible but remote connection between those branches. The evidence for a subgroup of genetically related Southern African Khoisan languages in the tree is, however, very thin and of such uneven quality that the reality of a Macro-Khoisan family has been questioned. Conventional methods of linguistic comparison applied between the main groups of the Khoisan languages have failed to yield regular sound correspondences, which would allow common roots to be reconstructed; and shared innovations in grammatical structure, which are regarded as the best source of evidence for postulating linguistic relationships are, frustratingly, absent. The Click Here to see full-size table
table illustrates this problem with a few basic words from the main subdivisions. The overwhelming impression is of radical differences between the groups. The word for ‘buffalo’ shows Sandawe’s link to the Khoe group, but the similar form in Ju is most probably a borrowing from a neighbouring Khoe language rather than an inherited form from a common ancestor. The similarity between the Khoe and !Xóõ forms for ‘drink’ and ‘laugh’ hints at possible sound correspondences between the vowels and the consonants, but this similarity fails to extend to other words in the two groups. The congruent differences between the Ju forms for ‘drink’ and ‘laugh’ on the one hand and the Khoe/!Xóõ forms on the other are intriguing, but, because they fail to generalize, they remain merely tantalizing. Ultimately, linguistic comparisons have led to far too few reasonable correspondences to establish secure family relationships between the languages.
A different approach to the problem of exploring linguistic relatedness involves mass comparisons of words between languages in the different groups. By allowing some flexibility in associating meanings and words rather than insisting on close semantic correspondences and rules of sound change, this technique has yielded some suggestive similarities, with a few of them even extending beyond the Khoisan languages to languages of the Niger-Congo family. When such cases involve clicks in Khoisan words corresponding to nonclicks in Niger-Congo words, the intractable problem of click genesis and click loss arises. It is possible that the failure to demonstrate Khoisan linguistic relationships convincingly is a function of the limitations of conventional and other comparative methods to penetrate the great time-depth separating the groups.