Khoisan languages

Khoisan languages, a unique group of African languages spoken mainly in southern Africa, with two outlying languages found in eastern Africa. The term is a compound adapted from the words khoekhoe ‘person’ and saan ‘bush dweller’ in Nama, one of the Khoisan languages, and scholars have applied the words—either separately or conjoined—to refer to economic, social, physical, and linguistic features of certain aboriginal groups of southern and eastern Africa. Their most distinctive linguistic characteristic is the original and extensive use of click consonants, a feature which has spread through cultural and linguistic contact into a number of Bantu (Niger-Congo) languages—such as Xhosa, Zulu, and Sotho in South Africa and Gciriku (Diriku), Yei (Yeye), and Mbukushu in Botswana and Namibia—and into Dahalo, a Cushitic (Afro-Asiatic) language of Kenya. The linguistic use of clicks, whether original or borrowed, is restricted to these few African languages, with one exception: Damin. This ritual vocabulary of the Lardil of Australia contains some words with clicks together with other peculiar sounds, but the use of clicks is limited, and they have a symbolic value in addition to their linguistic function.

Overview

The Khoisan languages were once spoken across all of southern Africa from southern Angola in the west to Swaziland in the east and the Cape of Good Hope in the south (see the map). The 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries, however, have witnessed the death of many of the recorded languages and dialects, and their distribution is now largely confined to Botswana and Namibia. (Click here for an audio sample of the extinct !Ora language.) The fact that many of the surviving languages are endangered and some are even on the point of extinction bears testimony to inexorable social, economic, linguistic, and demographic forces that continue to marginalize and consume indigenous linguistic and cultural minorities. Hadza (Hatsa), one of the East African Khoisan languages, is a remarkable exception to this, having retained its vitality through a pattern of stable bilingualism with Swahili, the dominant Bantu language in the area. Elsewhere many bilingual Khoisan speakers have tended to shift rapidly to the dominant language, thus ceasing transmission of the mother tongue to children and leaving it to contract and die, sometimes quite abruptly. In South Africa a variation of this process allowed the Khoisan languages to exert a powerful linguistic influence on the dominant languages before they disappeared, leaving Afrikaans and some Bantu languages with a number of distinctive Khoisan features.

The original and unique use of clicks in the Khoisan languages has invited speculation that these unusual sounds might reflect an earlier stage in the evolution of language when sounds were natural vocal adaptations to the environment. In this view Khoisan hunters might have developed clicks to camouflage their presence as they stalked their prey in an environment of insect and other noises or might have responded to various situations with onomatopoetic vocalizations containing clicks. But this line of thinking has proved fruitless. All languages use sound symbolism to some extent, and, while there are indeed examples of clicks functioning in this way (for example, !ã, the word for the clicking noise made by the knee joints of a walking eland [Taurotragus oryx], contains an appropriate click in one Khoisan language), their normal linguistic function is as unremarkable as the function of more familiar consonants such as b or s in any language. The origin of Khoisan click consonants and their peculiarly African provenance therefore remains a mystery.

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One puzzling feature of the Khoisan languages is that, despite some uniformity in their use of clicks, they differ considerably among themselves in aspects such as word formation, sentence structure, and vocabulary. In fact, these differences are so pronounced as to suggest that in a linguistic discussion the term Khoisan should be used only in a loose typological sense to refer to a group of languages that share some features of sound structure (mainly involving clicks) and not as the name of a language family in the strict sense—such as Indo-European, Sino-Tibetan, or Bantu—in which some shared features are found at all levels of structure and these features are assumed to have been inherited from a common ancestral language. Even though the sound structure of the Khoisan languages is unique, their resemblance to each other in this respect has not provided the evidence needed to unravel all their internal genetic affiliations, let alone their relationships to other African languages. The debate about these relationships remains a prominent feature in the linguistic study of Khoisan languages, and the disagreements that sustain it have never been satisfactorily resolved.