The Khoekhoe language (), also known by the ethnic terms Nama (''Namagowab'') , Damara (''ǂNūkhoegowab''), or Nama/Damara and formerly as Hottentot, is the most widespread of the non-

Bantu Bantu may refer to: *Bantu languages, constitute the largest sub-branch of the Niger–Congo languages *Bantu peoples, over 400 peoples of Africa speaking a Bantu language * Bantu knots, a type of African hairstyle *Black Association for National ...

languages of Southern Africa that make heavy use of

click consonant Click consonants, or clicks, are speech sounds that occur as consonants in many languages of Southern Africa and in three languages of East Africa. Examples familiar to English-speakers are the '' tut-tut'' (British spelling) or '' tsk! tsk!'' ...

s and therefore were formerly classified as

Khoisan Khoisan , or (), according to the contemporary Khoekhoegowab orthography, is a catch-all term for those indigenous peoples of Southern Africa who do not speak one of the Bantu languages, combining the (formerly "Khoikhoi") and the or ( in t ...

, a grouping now recognized as obsolete. It belongs to the Khoe language family, and is spoken in

Namibia Namibia (, ), officially the Republic of Namibia, is a country in Southern Africa. Its western border is the Atlantic Ocean. It shares land borders with Zambia and Angola to the north, Botswana to the east and South Africa to the south and ea ...

Botswana Botswana (, ), officially the Republic of Botswana ( tn, Lefatshe la Botswana, label=Setswana, ), is a landlocked country in Southern Africa. Botswana is topographically flat, with approximately 70 percent of its territory being the Kalahar ...

, and

South Africa South Africa, officially the Republic of South Africa (RSA), is the southernmost country in Africa. It is bounded to the south by of coastline that stretch along the South Atlantic and Indian Oceans; to the north by the neighbouring countri ...

primarily by three ethnic groups: Namakhoen, ǂNūkhoen, and Haiǁomkhoen.

History

The Haiǁom, who had spoken a Juu language, later shifted to Khoekhoe. The name for the speakers, ''

Khoekhoen 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. ...

'', is from the word ''khoe'' "person", with

reduplication In linguistics, reduplication is a morphological process in which the root or stem of a word (or part of it) or even the whole word is repeated exactly or with a slight change. The classic observation on the semantics of reduplication is Edwa ...

and the suffix ''-n'' to indicate the general plural.

Georg Friedrich Wreede Georg Friedrich Wreede or Georgius Fredericius Wreede (died on 29 February 1672) was governor of Dutch Mauritius from 1665 to 1672, with a break between 1668-1669. Wreede was born around 1635 in Uetze near Hannover, in Germany. In 1659 he a ...

was the first European to study the language, after arriving in ǁHui!gaeb (later Cape Town) in 1659.

Status

Khoekhoe is a

national language A national language is a language (or language variant, e.g. dialect) that has some connection—de facto or de jure—with a nation. There is little consistency in the use of this term. One or more languages spoken as first languages in the te ...

in Namibia. In Namibia and South Africa, state-owned broadcasting corporations produce and broadcast radio programmes in Khoekhoegowab. It is estimated that only around 167,000 speakers of Khoekhoegowab remain in Africa, which makes it an

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 ...

. In 2019, the

University of Cape Town The University of Cape Town (UCT) ( af, Universiteit van Kaapstad, xh, Yunibesithi ya yaseKapa) is a public research university in Cape Town, South Africa. Established in 1829 as the South African College, it was granted full university statu ...

ran a series of short courses teaching the language, and 21 September 2020 launched its new Khoi and San Centre. An undergraduate degree programme is being planned to be rolled out in coming years.

Dialects

Modern scholars generally see three dialects: * Nama– Damara, incl.

Sesfontein Damara The Sesfontein Damara is a group of the ǂNū-khoë ( Damara) people residing around !Naniǀaus (Sesfontein) in northwestern Namibia Namibia (, ), officially the Republic of Namibia, is a country in Southern Africa. Its western border is ...

* Haiǁom * ǂĀkhoe, itself a

dialect cluster A dialect continuum or dialect chain is a series of language varieties spoken across some geographical area such that neighboring varieties are mutually intelligible, but the differences accumulate over distance so that widely separated varie ...

, and intermediate between Haiǁom and the

Kalahari Khoe languages The Khoi languages are the largest of the non- Bantu language families indigenous to Southern Africa. They were once considered to be a branch of a Khoisan language family, and were known as Central Khoisan in that scenario. Though Khoisan is ...

They are distinct enough that they might be considered two or three distinct languages. * Eini (extinct) is also close but is now generally counted as a distinct language.

Phonology

Nama man giving us a lesson in the click language (3694165852)

Vowels

There are 5 vowel qualities, found as oral and nasal . is strongly rounded, only slightly so. is the only vowel with notable allophony; it is pronounced before or .

Tone

Nama has been described as having threeHagman (1977) or fourHaacke & Eiseb (2002) tones, or , which may occur on each

mora Mora may refer to: People * Mora (surname) Places Sweden * Mora, Säter, Sweden * Mora, Sweden, the seat of Mora Municipality * Mora Municipality, Sweden United States * Mora, Louisiana, an unincorporated community * Mora, Minnesota, a city * M ...

(vowels and final

nasal consonant In phonetics, a nasal, also called a nasal occlusive or nasal stop in contrast with an oral stop or nasalized consonant, is an occlusive consonant produced with a lowered velum, allowing air to escape freely through the nose. The vast majorit ...

s). The high tone is higher when it occurs on one of the high vowels () or on a nasal () than on mid or low vowels (). The tones combine into a limited number of 'tone melodies' (

word tone Tone is the use of pitch in language to distinguish lexical or grammatical meaning – that is, to distinguish or to inflect words. All verbal languages use pitch to express emotional and other paralinguistic information and to convey emph ...

s), which have

sandhi Sandhi ( sa, सन्धि ' , "joining") is a cover term for a wide variety of sound changes that occur at morpheme or word boundaries. Examples include fusion of sounds across word boundaries and the alteration of one sound depending on near ...

forms in certain syntactic environments. The most important melodies, in their citation and main sandhi forms, are as follows:

Stress

Within a phrase,

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 receive greater stress than

grammatical word In linguistics, function words (also called functors) are words that have little lexical meaning or have ambiguous meaning and express grammatical relationships among other words within a sentence, or specify the attitude or mood of the speaker. ...

s. Within a word, the first syllable receives the most stress. Subsequent syllables receive less and less stress and are spoken more and more quickly.

Consonants

Nama has 31 consonants: 20 clicks and only 11 non-clicks.

Non-clicks (orthography in italics)

Between vowels, is pronounced and is pronounced . The affricate series is strongly aspirated, and may be analysed phonemically as aspirated stops; in the related

Korana The Korana is a river in central Croatia and west Bosnia and Herzegovina. The river has a total length of and watershed area of . The river's name is derived from Proto-Indo-European ''*karr-'' 'rock'. It was recorded in the 13th century as '' ...

they are . 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. This sound no longer occurs in Khoekhoe but remains in its cousin Korana.

Clicks

The clicks are

doubly articulated consonant Doubly articulated consonants are consonants with two simultaneous primary places of articulation of the same manner (both plosive, or both nasal, etc.). They are a subset of co-articulated consonants. They are to be distinguished from co-articul ...

s. Each click consists of one of four primary articulations or "influxes" and one of five secondary articulation or "effluxes". The combination results in 20 phonemes. The aspiration on the aspirated clicks is often light but is 'raspier' than the aspirated nasal clicks, with a sound approaching the ''ch'' of Scottish ''loch''. The glottalised clicks are clearly voiceless due to the hold before the release, and they are transcribed as simple voiceless clicks in the traditional orthography. The nasal component is not audible in initial position; the voiceless nasal component of the aspirated clicks is also difficult to hear when not between vowels, so to foreign ears, it may sound like a longer but less raspy version of the contour clicks. Tindall notes that European learners almost invariably pronounce the lateral clicks by placing the tongue against the side teeth and that this articulation is "harsh and foreign to the native ear". The Namaqua instead cover the whole of the palate with the tongue and produce the sound "as far back in the palate as possible".

Phonotactics

Lexical root words consist of two or rarely three

s, in the form CVCV(C), CVV(C), or CVN(C). (The initial consonant is required.) The middle consonant may only be ''w r m n'' (''w'' is ''b~p'' and ''r'' is ''d~t''), while the final consonant (C) may only be ''p, s, ts''. Each mora carries tone, but the second may only be high or medium, for six tone "melodies": HH, MH, LH, HM, MM, LM. Oral vowel sequences in CVV are . Due to the reduced number of nasal vowels, nasal sequences are . Sequences ending in a high vowel () are pronounced more quickly than others (), more like diphthongs and long vowels than like vowel sequences in hiatus. The tones are realised as contours. CVCV words tend to have the same vowel sequences, though there are many exceptions. The two tones are also more distinct. Vowel-nasal sequences are restricted to non-front vowels: . Their tones are also realised as contours. Grammatical particles have the form CV or CN, with any vowel or tone, where C may be any consonant but a click, and the latter cannot be NN. Suffixes and a third mora of a root, may have the form CV, CN, V, N, with any vowel or tone; there are also three C-only suffixes, ''-p'' 1m.sg, ''-ts'' 2m.sg, ''-s'' 2/3f.sg.

Orthography

There have been several orthographies used for Nama. ''A Khoekhoegowab dictionary'' (Haacke 2000) uses the modern standard. In standard orthography, the consonants ''b d g'' are used for words with one of the lower tone melodies and ''p t k'' for one of the higher tone melodies. ''W'' is only used between vowels, though it may be replaced with ''b'' or ''p'' according to melody. Overt tone marking is otherwise generally omitted. Nasal vowels are written with a circumflex. All nasal vowels are long, as in ''hû'' 'seven'. Long (double) vowels are otherwise written with a macron, as in ''ā'' 'to cry, weep'; these constitute two moras (two tone-bearing units). A glottal stop is not written at the beginning of a word (where it is predictable), but it is transcribed with a hyphen in compound words, such as ''gao-aob'' 'chief'. The clicks are written using the IPA symbols: *ǀ (a

vertical bar The vertical bar, , is a glyph with various uses in mathematics, computing, and typography. It has many names, often related to particular meanings: Sheffer stroke (in logic), pipe, bar, or (literally the word "or"), vbar, and others. Usage ...

) for a

dental click Dental (or more precisely denti-alveolar) clicks are a family of click consonants found, as constituents of words, only in Africa and in the Damin ritual jargon of Australia. In English, the ''tut-tut!'' (British spelling, "tutting") or ''ts ...

*ǁ (a double vertical bar) for a

lateral click The lateral clicks are a family of click consonants found only in African languages. The clicking sound used by equestrians to urge on their horses is a lateral click, although it is not a speech sound in that context. Lateral clicks are found t ...

*ǃ (an

exclamation mark The exclamation mark, , or exclamation point (American English), is a punctuation mark usually used after an interjection or exclamation to indicate strong feelings or to show emphasis. The exclamation mark often marks the end of a sentence, f ...

) for an

alveolar click The alveolar or postalveolar clicks are a family of click consonants found only in Africa and in the Damin ritual jargon of Australia. The tongue is more or less concave (depending on the language), and is pulled down rather than back as in t ...

*ǂ (a

double dagger A dagger, obelisk, or obelus is a typographical mark that usually indicates a footnote if an asterisk has already been used. The symbol is also used to indicate death (of people) or extinction (of species). It is one of the modern descenda ...

) for a

palatal click The palatal or palato-alveolar clicks are a family of click consonants found, as components of words, only in southern Africa. The tongue is nearly flat, and is pulled back rather than down as in the postalveolar clicks, making a sharper sound ...

Sometimes other characters are substituted, e.g. the hash (#) in place of ǂ.

Grammar

Nama has a

subject–object–verb Subject ( la, subiectus "lying beneath") may refer to: Philosophy *'' Hypokeimenon'', or ''subiectum'', in metaphysics, the "internal", non-objective being of a thing **Subject (philosophy), a being that has subjective experiences, subjective con ...

word order, three nouns classes (''masculine/gu-class, feminine/di-class'' and ''neuter/n-class'') and three

grammatical number In linguistics, grammatical number is a grammatical category of nouns, pronouns, adjectives and verb agreement that expresses count distinctions (such as "one", "two" or "three or more"). English and other languages present number categories of ...

s (''singular, dual'' and ''plural''). Pronominal

enclitic In morphology and syntax, a clitic (, backformed from Greek "leaning" or "enclitic"Crystal, David. ''A First Dictionary of Linguistics and Phonetics''. Boulder, CO: Westview, 1980. Print.) is a morpheme that has syntactic characteristics of a wo ...

s are used to mark person, gender, and number on the

noun phrase In linguistics, a noun phrase, or nominal (phrase), is a phrase that has a noun or pronoun as its head or performs the same grammatical function as a noun. Noun phrases are very common cross-linguistically, and they may be the most frequently oc ...

Person, gender and number markers

The PGN (

person A person ( : people) is a being that has certain capacities or attributes such as reason, morality, consciousness or self-consciousness, and being a part of a culturally established form of social relations such as kinship, ownership of property, ...

gender Gender is the range of characteristics pertaining to femininity and masculinity and differentiating between them. Depending on the context, this may include sex-based social structures (i.e. gender roles) and gender identity. Most cultures u ...

number A number is a mathematical object used to count, measure, and label. The original examples are the natural numbers 1, 2, 3, 4, and so forth. Numbers can be represented in language with number words. More universally, individual numbers c ...

) markers are

pronoun In linguistics and grammar, a pronoun (abbreviated ) is a word or a group of words that one may substitute for a noun or noun phrase. Pronouns have traditionally been regarded as one of the parts of speech, but some modern theorists would not co ...

s that attach to

s. The PGN markers distinguish first, second, and third

, masculine, feminine, and neuter

, and singular, dual, and plural

. The PGN markers can be divided into

nominative In grammar, the nominative case (abbreviated ), subjective case, straight case or upright case is one of the grammatical cases of a noun or other part of speech, which generally marks the subject of a verb or (in Latin and formal variants of Engl ...

object Object may refer to: General meanings * Object (philosophy), a thing, being, or concept ** Object (abstract), an object which does not exist at any particular time or place ** Physical object, an identifiable collection of matter * Goal, an ...

, and

oblique Oblique may refer to: * an alternative name for the character usually called a slash (punctuation) ( / ) * Oblique angle, in geometry *Oblique triangle, in geometry *Oblique lattice, in geometry * Oblique leaf base, a characteristic shape of the b ...

paradigms.

Nominative

Object

(PGN + ''i'')

Oblique

(PGN + ''a'')

Articles

Khoekhoe has four

definite article An article is any member of a class of dedicated words that are used with noun phrases to mark the identifiability of the referents of the noun phrases. The category of articles constitutes a part of speech. In English, both "the" and "a(n)" ar ...

s: ''ti'', ''si'', ''sa'', ''ǁî''. These definite articles can be combined with PGN markers. Examples from Haacke (2013): * ''si-khom'' "we two males" (someone other than addressee and I) * ''sa-khom'' "we two males" (addressee and I) * ''ǁî-khom'' "we two males" (someone else referred to previously and I)

Clause headings

There are three clause markers, ge ( declarative), kha (

interrogative An interrogative clause is a clause whose form is typically associated with question-like meanings. For instance, the English sentence "Is Hannah sick?" has interrogative syntax which distinguishes it from its declarative counterpart "Hannah is ...

), and ko/km (

assertive Assertiveness is the quality of being self-assured and confident without being aggressive to defend a right point of view or a relevant statement. In the field of psychology and psychotherapy, it is a skill that can be learned and a mode of communi ...

). These markers appear in

matrix clause An independent clause (or main clause) is a clause that can stand by itself as a ''simple sentence''. An independent clause contains a subject and a predicate and makes sense by itself. Independent clauses can be joined by using a semicolon or ...

s, and appear after the subject.

Sample text

Following is a sample text in the Khoekhoe language.''Khoekhoegowab: 3ǁî xoaigaub''. Gamsberg Macmillan, 2003 :''Nē ǀkharib ǃnâ da ge ǁGûn tsî ǀGaen tsî doan tsîn; tsî ǀNopodi tsî ǀKhenadi tsî ǀhuigu tsî ǀAmin tsîn; tsî ǀkharagagu ǀaon tsîna ra hō.'' :In this region, we find springbuck, oryx, and duiker; francolin, guinea fowl, bustard, and ostrich; and also various kinds of snake.

Common words and phrases

*ǃGâi tsēs – Good day *ǃGâi ǁgoas – Good morning *ǃGâi ǃoes – Good evening *Matisa – How are you? *ǃGâise ǃgû re – Goodbye *ǁKhawa mûgus – See you soon *Regkomtani – I'll manage *Tae na Tae – How's it hanging (direct translation "What is what")

Bibliography

*''Khoekhoegowab/English for Children'', Éditions du Cygne, 2013, *Beach, Douglas M. 1938. The Phonetics of the Hottentot Language. Cambridge: Heffer. *Brugman, Johanna. 2009
Segments, Tones and Distribution in Khoekhoe Prosody
PhD Thesis, Cornell University. *Haacke, Wilfrid. 1976. ''A Nama Grammar: The Noun-phrase''. MA thesis. Cape Town:

. *Haacke, Wilfrid H. G. 1977. "The So-called "Personal Pronoun" in Nama." In Traill, Anthony, ed., Khoisan Linguistic Studies 3, 43–62. Communications 6. Johannesburg: African Studies Institute,

University of the Witwatersrand The University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg (), is a multi-campus South African Public university, public research university situated in the northern areas of central Johannesburg. It is more commonly known as Wits University or Wits ( o ...

. *Haacke, Wilfrid. 1978. ''Subject Deposition in Nama''. MA thesis. Colchester, UK:

University of Essex The University of Essex is a public university, public research university in Essex, England. Established by royal charter in 1965, Essex is one of the original plate glass university, plate glass universities. Essex's shield consists of the an ...

. *Haacke, Wilfrid. 1992. "Compound Noun Phrases in Nama". In Gowlett, Derek F., ed., ''African Linguistic Contributions (Festschrift Ernst Westphal)'', 189–194. Pretoria: Via Afrika. *Haacke, Wilfrid. 1992. "Dislocated Noun Phrases in Khoekhoe (Nama/Damara): Further Evidence for the Sentential Hypothesis". ''Afrikanistische Arbeitspapiere'', 29, 149–162. *Haacke, Wilfrid. 1995. "Instances of Incorporation and Compounding in Khoekhoegowab (Nama/Damara)". In Anthony Traill, Rainer Vossen and Marguerite Anne Megan Biesele, eds., ''The Complete Linguist: Papers in Memory of Patrick J. Dickens''", 339–361. Cologne: Rüdiger Köppe Verlag. *Haacke, Wilfrid; Eiseb, Eliphas and Namaseb, Levi. 1997. "Internal and External Relations of Khoekhoe Dialects: A Preliminary Survey". In Wilfrid Haacke & Edward D. Elderkin, eds., Namibian Languages: Reports and Papers, 125–209. Cologne: Rüdiger Köppe Verlag for the

University of Namibia The University of Namibia (UNAM) is a multi-campus public research university in Namibia, as well as the largest university in the country. It was established by an act of Parliament on 31 August 1992. Background UNAM comprises the follow ...

. *Haacke, Wilfrid. 1999. ''The Tonology of Khoekhoe (Nama/Damara). Quellen zur Khoisan-Forschung/Research'' in Khoisan Studies, Bd 16. Cologne: Rüdiger Köppe Verlag. *Haacke, Wilfrid H.G. & Eiseb, Eliphas. 2002. ''A Khoekhoegowab Dictionary with an English-Khoekhoegowab Index''. Windhoek : Gamsberg Macmillan. *Hagman, Roy S. 1977. ''Nama Hottentot Grammar''. Language Science Monographs, v 15. Bloomington:

Indiana University Indiana University (IU) is a system of public universities in the U.S. state of Indiana. Campuses Indiana University has two core campuses, five regional campuses, and two regional centers under the administration of IUPUI. *Indiana Universit ...

. *Krönlein, Johann Georg. 1889
Wortschatz der Khoi-Khoin (Namaqua-Hottentotten)
Berlin : Deutsche Kolonialgesellschaft. * Olpp, Johannes. 1977. Nama-grammatika. Windhoek : Inboorlingtaalburo van die Departement van Bantoe-onderwys. * Rust, Friedrich. 1965. Praktische Namagrammatik. Cape Town : Balkema. *Vossen, Rainer. 2013. ''The Khoesan Languages''. Oxon: Routledge.

Notes

References

External links

*

(dead link as of January 2009

by the Internet Archive)
KhoeSan Active Awareness Group
(dead link as of 17 October 2010)
An 8-minute clip of spoken Hottentot (khoekhoegowab)
(dead as of January 2017

Khoekhoe basic lexicon at the Global Lexicostatistical DatabaseKhoe music / field recordings (International Library of African Music)
{{DEFAULTSORT:Khoekhoe Language Khoe languages Languages of Botswana Languages of Namibia Languages of South Africa Damara people Nama people Khoikhoi