ǃOrakobab or ''Khoemana'', also known as Korana, ǃOra, or Griqua, is a
moribund
Moribund refers to a literal or figurative state near death.
Moribund may refer to:
* ''Moribund'' (album), a 2006 album by the Norwegian black metal band Koldbrann
* "Le Moribond", a song by Jacques Brel known in English as "Seasons in the Sun" ...
Khoe language
Khwe (also rendered ''Kxoe, Khoe'' ) is a dialect continuum of the Khoe languages, Khoe family of Namibia, Angola, Botswana, South Africa, and parts of Zambia, with some 8,000 speakers.
Classification
Khwe is a member of the Khoe languages, ...
of South Africa.
Names
"Khoemana" (from ''khoe'' 'person' + ''mana'' 'language') is more commonly known as either Korana (also ǃOrakobab, ǃOra, Kora, Koraqua) or Griqua (also Gri , Xri, Xiri, Xirikwa). The name 'Korana' reflects the endonym ǃOra or ǃGora , referring to the
ǃOra people
The Griquas (; af, Griekwa, often confused with ''!Orana'', which is written as ''Korana'' or ''Koranna'') are a subgroup of heterogeneous former Khoe-speaking nations in Southern Africa with a unique origin in the early history of the Cape ...
. Sometimes ǃOra is also known as Cape Khoe or Cape Hottentot, though the latter has become considered derogatory. The various names are often treated as different languages (called South Khoekhoe when taken together), but they do not correspond to any actual dialect distinctions, and speakers may use "Korana" and "Griqua" interchangeably. Both names are also used more broadly, for example for the
Griqua people
The Griquas (; af, Griekwa, often confused with ''!Orana'', which is written as ''Korana'' or ''Koranna'') are a subgroup of heterogeneous former Khoe-speaking nations in Southern Africa with a unique origin in the early history of the Cape ...
. There exist (or existed) several dialects of Khoemana, but the details are unknown.
[Killian, D]
''Khoemana and the Griqua''
/ref>
Phonology
Khoemana is closely related to Khoekhoe
Khoekhoen (singular Khoekhoe) (or Khoikhoi in the former orthography; formerly also '' Hottentots''"Hottentot, n. and adj." ''OED Online'', Oxford University Press, March 2018, www.oed.com/view/Entry/88829. Accessed 13 May 2018. Citing G. S. ...
, and the sound systems are broadly similar. The strongly aspirated Khoekhoe affricates are simply aspirated plosives in Khoemana. However, Khoemana has an ejective velar affricate, , which is not found in Khoekhoe, and a corresponding series of clicks, . Beach (1938) reported that the Khoekhoe of the time had a velar lateral ejective affricate
The velar lateral ejective affricate is a rare type of consonantal sound, used in some spoken languages. The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents this sound is ( extIPA; strict IPA: ).
It is found in two forms in Archi ...
, , a common realisation or allophone of in languages with clicks, and it might be expected that this is true for Khoemana as well. In addition, about half of all lexical word
In grammar, a part of speech or part-of-speech (abbreviated as POS or PoS, also known as word class or grammatical category) is a category of words (or, more generally, of lexical items) that have similar grammatical properties. Words that are ass ...
s in Khoemana began with a click, compared to a quarter in Khoekhoe.
In Korana, eand acan be pronounced as eand a
* The phoneme can be realized as /c/ before or
* An intervocalic and are sometimes realized as /β/.
* is stated to be alveolar-postalveolar when not followed by a close front vowel © or
* The aspirated phoneme Ê°is realized as an affricate sound /ts/ when followed by a close front vowel © or
* The aspirated sound ʰcan sometimes be realized as x Some Griqua speakers may pronounce ʰas ʼ
* The sʼ
The alveolar ejective fricative is a type of consonantal sound, used in some spoken languages. The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents this sound is .
Features
Features of the alveolar ejective fricative:
Occur ...
sound only seldom occurs.
* and can occur syllabically as Ì©and Ì©
* The trilled can also be realized as a flapped ¾in some speech.
* Voicing can be very weak in Khoemana in casual speech, so voiced plosives can be hard to distinguish from voiceless plosives.
There are four tones in Khoemana:
Population
Reports as to the number of Khoemana speakers are contradictory, but it is clear that it is nearly extinct. It was thought to be extinct until the discovery of four elderly speakers around Bloemfontein and Kimberley. A 2009 report by Don Killian of the University of Helsinki
The University of Helsinki ( fi, Helsingin yliopisto, sv, Helsingfors universitet, abbreviated UH) is a public research university located in Helsinki, Finland since 1829, but founded in the city of Turku (in Swedish ''Ã…bo'') in 1640 as the ...
estimated that there were less than 30 speakers at the time.[ Matthias Brenzinger reported in 2012 that one possible speaker remained, but that she refused to speak the language. The discrepancies could be because the language has multiple dialects and goes by several names, with scholars not always referring to the same population.][ Khoemana is listed as "critically endangered" in ]UNESCO
The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization is a specialized agency of the United Nations (UN) aimed at promoting world peace and security through international cooperation in education, arts, sciences and culture. It ...
's ''Language Atlas''.[UNESC]
Xiri
at ''UNESCO Atlas of the World's Languages in Danger'' The loss of this endangered language
An endangered language or moribund language is a language that is at risk of disappearing as its speakers die out or shift to speaking other languages. Language loss occurs when the language has no more native speakers and becomes a "dead langu ...
would have a significant impact on the heritage and culture of Khoemana speakers.
Attestation
Robust Khoemana (before more recent language attrition
Language attrition is the process of losing a native or first language. This process is generally caused by both isolation from speakers of the first language ("L1") and the acquisition and use of a second language ("L2"), which interferes with ...
) is principally recorded in an 1879 notebook by Lucy Lloyd
Lucy Catherine Lloyd (7 November 1834 – 31 August 1914) was the creator, along with Wilhelm Bleek, of the 19th-century archive of ǀXam and !Kung texts.
Early life
Lucy Catherine Lloyd was born in Norbury in England on 7 November 1834. He ...
, which contains five short stories; some additional work was done in Ponelis (1975).[Ponelis, F. A. (1975). "ǃOra Clicks: Problems and Speculations." ''Bushman and Hottentot Linguistic Studies,'' pp 51–60. ed. Anthony Traill. Communications from the African Studies Institute, no 2. University of the Witwatersrand. Johannesburg.] As of 2009, the EuroBABEL project is searching for remaining speakers.
History
The people and their language first began to attract scholarly attention in the 1660s, coinciding with Dutch colonial efforts in the Cape of Good Hope
The Cape of Good Hope ( af, Kaap die Goeie Hoop ) ;''Kaap'' in isolation: pt, Cabo da Boa Esperança is a rocky headland on the Atlantic coast of the Cape Peninsula in South Africa.
A common misconception is that the Cape of Good Hope is t ...
and the resulting armed conflicts.[ At the time, Khoemana was widely spoken throughout the coastal regions of South Africa. After years of attrition during the colonial era to the 1930s, and under ]apartheid
Apartheid (, especially South African English: , ; , "aparthood") was a system of institutionalised racial segregation that existed in South Africa and South West Africa (now Namibia) from 1948 to the early 1990s. Apartheid was ...
from 1948 to 1994, the language has all but vanished.[ Currently, speakers of Khoemana are not only scarce but scattered, due to forced migrations during the apartheid era. This has rendered the language particularly vulnerable.][Erasmus, P]
''Dreams and Visions in Koranna and Griqua Revival in Colonial and Post-Apartheid South Africa''
/ref>
References
Further reading
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*Maingard, L.F. 1962. Korana Folktales. Grammar and Texts. Johannesburg: Witwatersrand University Press
External links
*
ǃKorana basic lexicon at the Global Lexicostatistical Database
*ELAR archive o
Dictionary of Korana ('Ora)
Rosetta Project: Xiri Swadesh List
{{Khoisan
Khoe languages
Griqua
Languages of South Africa
Languages of Namibia
Endangered languages of Africa