1. Thus their language is variously said to be extinct or to have 18,000 speakers, to be Ju or to be Khoe. Beadwork similar to the Ndebele is an integral aspect of Xhosa tradition. Kikuyu, Xhosa is listed amongst South Africa's 11 official languages and is spoken by approximately 18% of the country's population (plus-minus 7.9 million individuals). languages as a result of long and extensive interaction between the The following three are languages from the Khoe family, the Kxa family, and the Tuu family, respectively. Grammatically, the southern Khoisan languages are generally analytic, having several inflectional morphemes, but not as many as the click languages of Tanzania. This produces an audible noise. No change when the following consonant is itself a nasal. The Khoe family appears to have migrated to southern Africa not long before the Bantu expansion. Tswa, As a result of this contact, the Xhosa people borrowed some Khoisan words along with their pronunciation, for instance, the click sounds of the Khoisan languages. 2014 - 2023. Its speakers and people belonging to the group are called isiXhosa. The red letters are orthographic representations of the sounds. ''Studies in African Linguistic Classification.'' Although Xhosa and Zulu are similar enough to be considered dialects of one language, Xhosa and Zulu speakers consider them to be separate languages. These are the only languages known to have clicks in normal vocabulary. Of these languages, Xhosa, Zulu, Ndebele and Yeyi have intricate systems of click consonants; the others, despite the click in the name Gciriku, more rudimentary ones. The normal word order in Xhosa is Verb-Object (the subject is part of the verb compound). Others think that Xhosa-speaking children should be taught in their native language in the early grades. Additional phonemes use sequences of multiple letters. Kinyarwanda, Impariamo insieme! There are books, Save my name, email, and website in this browser for the next time I comment. Omissions? Who are the Khoisan People? - WorldAtlas Home South African Culture and Tradition Explored Languages of South Africa Xhosa Language of the Eastern Cape. Bonke abantu bazalwa bekhululekile belingana ngesidima Group of African language families with click consonants, "San language" redirects here. . By creating an account, I agree to theTerms of service and Privacy policy. In Xhosa, the verb "have" is represented by the word "nga" and its various forms. In all of the Southern African Khoisan languages, a simple rule applies to using the sound. In, Honken, Henry. They are known as the Saa by the Nama, and this is the source of the word San. Read More; development. In, Gldemann, Tom and Rainer Vossen. Most have no written record. These sounds were borrowed from the Khoisan languages of the original inhabitants of the area. [4][5] It has been suggested that the similarities of the Tuu and Kxa families are due to a southern African Sprachbund rather than a genealogical relationship, whereas the Khoe (or perhaps KwadiKhoe) family is a more recent migrant to the area, and may be related to Sandawe in East Africa.[3]. One of the main reasons for the decline is that bilingual Khoisan speakers shift to the dominant language of the area and stop teaching the language to their children. The Xhosa comprise a number of clans such as Gcaleka, Ngika, Ndlambe, Dushane and the Qayi. The first printed [citation needed], Khoisan was proposed as one of the four families of African languages in Joseph Greenberg's classification (19491954, revised in 1963). As with other South African languages, Xhosa is characterized by respectful forms of address for elders and in-laws. Gogo, By distribution over land, Xhosa is the most widely spoken African language (while Zulu is most widely spoken in terms of population). There are several places of articulation at which click consonants occur, as shown in the table below. A certain headdress will be a worn by a newly married girl, while a woman who has just given birth to her first child will wear a differently styled headdress. Other Bantu Languages include the Xhosa and Zulu languages, two languages famous for their large number of click consonants developed through their extended interaction with the Khoisan languages of Southern Africa. #CapeTownEPrix According to the 2011 census there / South Khoisan includes a couple of endangered and several extinct languages of the Kalahari Desert. The Khoisan I Meeting the Khoisan I Khoisan Click Language Khoisan languages are best known for their use of click consonants as phonemes. According to this hypothesis, clicks might have originally served as onomatopoetic imitations of naturally occurring sounds. The inventory is taken from Wikipedia. Xhosa, along with Zulu and other indigenous languages of South Africa, has been a source of many words that were borrowed by South African English and that do not occur in other varieties of English in other parts of the world. http://www.gononda.com/xhosa/, Xhosa phrases Most of the languages are endangered, and several are moribund or extinct. nangokweemfanelo. What animals did the Khoisan hunt? - TimesMojo Ejective consonants Palatalisation is a change that affects labial consonants whenever they are immediately followed by /j/. Like other Southern Bantu languages, Xhosa has borrowed words from the Khoisan languages, as well as from English and Afrikaans. Author of. Learn more about the Nilo-Saharan language family on Ethnologue. Bonny Sands (1998) concluded that the family is not demonstrable with current evidence. ), palatal (), and lateral (). Xhosa alphabet, pronunciation and language - Omniglot All languages use sound symbolism to some extent, and, while there are indeed examples of clicks functioning in this way (for example, !, 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. Voiceless palatal plosive becomes voiced. The Khoisan languages differ in the number of such modifications from a low of 20 in Nama to a high of 83 in Kxoe. Archaeological evidence suggests that the Khoisan people appeared in southern Africa some 60,000 years ago. second language speakers. The local Khoisan children speak mainly Afrikaans but Katrina Esau hopes this will change over time . The original stanza was: Additional stanzas were written later by Sontonga and other writers, with the original verse translated into Sotho and Afrikaans, as well as English. Traduzioni in contesto per "Xhosa" in inglese-ucraino da Reverso Context: Ubuntu is a concept and a term from several South African languages, including Zulu and Xhosa. Interestingly, the word Xhosa is from the Khoisan language and means "The angry men". Xhosa beliefs dictate that people turn to a diviner or healer, usually attired in a headdress and shawl of fur, when needing advice on how to deal with the spirits, help with illnesses, or to ward off evil from unnatural forces such as thetokoloshe a potentially malevolent goblin who attacks at night. Clicks are ingressive consonantal stops produced by an intake of air followed by a sudden withdrawal of the tongue from the soft palate, front teeth, or back teeth and hard palate. Isewell [CC BY-SA 2.5], via Wikimedia Commons. Aspiration is lost on obstruents; ejection is added on voiceless consonant. It is spoken by the Xhosa people in South Africa, and has around 8 million speakers. #VisitSouthAfrica https://t.co/xwXs0dxd2l, We've got you covered! The only widespread Khoisan language is Khoekhoe (also known as Khoekhoegowab, Nm or Damara) of Namibia, Botswana and South Africa, with a quarter of a million speakers; Sandawe in Tanzania is second in number with some 4080,000, some monolingual; and the Kung language of the northern Kalahari spoken by some 16,000 or so people. Sena, It is also taught in universities. Our editors will review what youve submitted and determine whether to revise the article. Xhosa is one of the 11 official languages recognized by the South African Constitution, and in 2006 it was determined that just over 7 million South Africans speak Xhosa as a home language. [12] It is the second most common Bantu home language in South Africa as a whole. Vowels can be either short or long. This came about because South African actor John Kani, a native of the Eastern Cape province who plays Wakandan King T'Chaka, speaks Xhosa and suggested that the directors of the fictional Civil War incorporate a dialogue in the language. Chokwe, Subscribe using the form below to have all of my posts delivered directly to your email. for $0.07/word. Total number of users in all countries is 19.2 million (Ethnologue). Let us know if you have suggestions to improve this article (requires login). A brief history of African click words | The Week http://xhosaculture.co.za/about-us/learn-xhosa/ The Xhosa, formerly called Kaffir or Kafir (Arabic for infidel), are a cluster of related peoples who have inhabited Eastern Cape Province and Transkei, South Africa, since before the 16th century. Believed to be the oldest of the four language families, it is the smallest of the four and is found mainly in Southern Africa. Tshiluba, Khoisan languages | Britannica "Phonetic Correspondences among Khoisan Affricates." The Languages of Africa | Infoplease The status of Xhosa, like all other African languages in the Republic of South Africa, is complex. Pair them with vowels, tones, and other constants and you've got a wide variety of sounds and meanings. Janina Brutt-Griffler claims, "given that such colonial borders were generally arbitrarily drawn, they grouped large numbers of ethnic groups that spoke many languages." The verb is modified by affixes to mark subject, object, tense, aspect and mood. Xhosa beliefs recognise the presence of ancestral spirits and a supreme authority. The language is also studied as a subject. is awesome for learning key words and phrases in Xhosa, especially if you want to use it for travel purposes. Can you reproduce these click types? Ever since Xhosa and Zulu were reduced to a written form in the early 19th century, Xhosa and Zulu writers have produced various works of fiction, ranging from poetry to novels. Xhosa is rich in uncommon consonants. Songe, In, Khler, O. Northern Sotho, However, tones are usually not indicated in writing. This distinctive linguistic characteristic was adopted by a number of neighbouring Bantu languages, such as Xhosa and Zulu in South Africa. However, linguists who study Khoisan languages reject 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. The following table lists the consonant phonemes of the language, with the pronunciation in IPA on the left and the orthography on the right: In addition to the ejective affricate [t], the spelling tsh may also be used for either of the aspirated affricates [ts] and [t]. The linguistic use of clicks, whether original or borrowed, is restricted to these few African languages, with one exception: Damin. It is a Bantu language closely related to Zulu, Swazi, and Ndebele. [12] It is the second most common Bantu home language in South Africa as a whole. Day 1 and 2 highlights of the Africa Green Economic Summit Author of, Professor Emeritus, Department of Linguistics, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa. (They may also be voiced between vowels in some speaking styles.) A Haiom language is listed in most Khoisan references. ), Khoisan Linguistic Studies . Masaaba, In A. Traill (ed. Introduction to African Languages | The African Language Program at Harvard Clicks are stops produced with two points of contact in the mouth: one forward and one in the back. Although little Kwadi data is available, proto-KhoeKwadi reconstructions have been made for pronouns and some basic vocabulary. Southern Khoisan languages have a very high ratio of words containing clicks as compared to those that do not contain them. iliso (eye), uluhlu (list). Click consonants can be modified in a variety of ways. "Comparison and Classification of Khoisan languages." 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. Aspirated clicks become prenasalized ejected clicks. The San were formerly called Bushmen, (from . It is closely related to Zulu, Swati, and Ndebele. All Khoisan languages but two are indigenous to southern Africa and belong to three language families. Please refer to the appropriate style manual or other sources if you have any questions. Starostin (2013) accepts a relationship between Sandawe and Khoi is plausible, as is one between Tuu and Kxa, but sees no indication of a relationship between Sandawe and Khoi on the one hand and Tuu and Kxa on the other, or between any of them and Hadza. Swati and Ndebele, and mutually intelligible with them to some extent. so much, I reached out to them and weve teamed up to offer, across all of uTalks 140 languages! In contrast to the San who spoke highly divergent languages, the Khoikhoi spoke closely related dialects of the same language. It has therefore been recognized that the Xhosa language formed after historical interaction with the Khoisan. Most syllables end in a vowel, and there are no consonant clusters. F https://t.co/s7IkqA9Utl, It feels good to have @KevinHart4real also known as Mpho here in Johannesburg, South Africa. In, Winter, J.C. 1981.