Ejective consonants 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. Interestingly, the word Xhosa is from the Khoisan language and means The angry men. This produces something like the English tut-tut. Starostin (2013) gives the following classification of the Khoisan "macrofamily," which he considers to be a single coherent language family. Italian for Confident Conversations (A2-B2). Bukusu, Ngqika is considered to be the standard variety. Most of the languages in South Africa that involve tongue-clicking originate from the indigenous Khoisan people, who included plenty of different clicks in their speech and language. In, This page was last edited on 10 January 2023, at 12:02. Is Xhosa a Khoisan language? For instance, they can be aspirated, nasalised and glottalised. These are divided into North, Central and South Khoisan groups belonging to southern Africa, plus two Tanzanian isolates, Sandawe and Hadza (Hatsa), which possess a few words, affixes, and particles that justify the assumption of a distant relationship with Khoisan. The Kxa family is a relatively distant relationship formally demonstrated in 2010.[11]. films, plays and songs. They are marked with a raised //. The Khoisan language groups are different in structure and vocabulary although the groups are closely related, unlike the Bantu languages such as the Xhosa and Zulu which are similar to one another. used as a language of instruction in primary schools, and in some Swati, All education at the university level is in English or Afrikaans. Although mutually intelligible, they are considered to be separate languages for political and cultural reasons. However, tones are usually not indicated in writing. http://www.freelang.net/dictionary/xhosa.php 3 The placeholder N in the prefixes iN- and iiN- is a nasal consonant which assimilates in place to the following consonant (producing an im- before vowels), but is typically absent in loanwords. [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]. Though these are still under debate, one frequently accepted dialect grouping is as follows: Xhosa (original), Bhaca, Gcaleka, Thembu, Mpondomise, Ngqika, Mpondo, Mfengu and Bomvana. Unfortunately, many of these languages have left behind no written records, so their loss is permanent. Using the prefixes, nouns can be grouped into noun classes, which are numbered consecutively, to ease comparison with other Bantu languages. People who speak Xhosa as their second language number about 11 million. The local Khoisan children speak mainly Afrikaans but Katrina Esau hopes this will change over time . F https://t.co/s7IkqA9Utl, It feels good to have @KevinHart4real also known as Mpho here in Johannesburg, South Africa. Makhuwa, For the Mande language spoken in Burkina Faso, see, Map showing the distribution of the Khoisan languages (yellow), Grammatically, the southern Khoisan languages are generally, Greenberg, Joseph H. 1955. Choose your English to Xhosa translation service. Consequently, the languages with the greatest numbers of consonants in the world are Khoisan. Save my name, email, and website in this browser for the next time I comment. Because Xhosa and Zulu are both classed as Bantu languages, they are quite similar. Xhosa (isiXhosa) is the southernmost member of the Bantoid group of the Niger-Congo language family in Africa. Chichewa, They are thought to have migrated to this region along the east coast of Africa and through central Africa. A palatal click is a sharp pop made by drawing the tongue down quickly from the roof of the mouth. Omissions? So by clicking on these links you can help to support this site. Lambya, Khoisan languages Bushman languages, also called San languages, loose grouping of languages that confusingly have been considered to be a separate group within the Khoisan languages. Linguistics 112 lecture, Department of Linguistics. Learn more about the Nilo-Saharan language family on Ethnologue. ), palatal (), and lateral (). Breathy-voiced consonants The town itself receives an abundant supply of water from an underground source, which is referred to as All trademarks and web sites that appear throughout this site are the property of their respective owners. The Tanzanian languages, Sandawe and Hadza, use only three basic clicks: |, , and !. Khoisan languages, a unique group of African languages spoken mainly in southern Africa, with two outlying languages found in eastern Africa. Xhosa is an unusual and attractive sounding language, though difficult to master. Sena, Fricatives become affricates. The Origins of the Xhosa Language The Xhosa Language has its roots in South Africa from an ethnic group known as the amaXhosa. 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. 4. Haya, Xhosa is a member of the Southeastern, or Nguni, subgroup of the Bantu group of the Benue-Congo branch of the Niger-Congo language family. The origin of clicks remains a mystery. http://learn101.org/xhosa.php Their language is often called the click language because of its three dominant clicks, which entered the isiXhosa language when the Nguni arrivals mixed with the Khoisan. The status of Xhosa, like all other African languages in the Republic of South Africa, is complex. 1997. Implosive consonants are produced by inhaling rather than exhaling the air. Xhosa may refer to: Xhosa people, a nation, and ethnic group, who live in south-central and southeasterly region of South Africa. The next are the alveolar clicks with the tongue tip and palate. A Niger-Congo language and a member of the Bantu family (Nguni group), spoken by more than 5 million people in the south-eastern part of South Africa, most notably in Cape Province and Transkei; also known as isiXhosa. Khoisan Last but not least is the Khoisan family with between 40 - 70 members. Making the Khoisan languages amongst the most ancient of all human tongues. The pocket of air produced by the resulting enclosure is rarefied by the sucking action of the tongue. South African Culture and Tradition Explored. Archaeological evidence suggests that the Khoisan people appeared in southern Africa some 60,000 years ago. "Phonetic Correspondences among Khoisan Affricates." Ancestors of the Xhosa migrated to the east coast of Africa and came across Khoisan-speaking people; "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". Nyamwezi, Colours | 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 different, Xhosa beliefs recognise the presence of ancestral spirits and a supreme authority. Learn the local language with her 80/20 method for less than the cost of eating at a tourist trap restaurant Start learning today! The numerous click consonants have been borrowed from Khoi or San words. Xhosa is an agglutinative language that expresses grammatical functions by adding prefixes and suffixes to roots. 2. Encyclopaedia Britannica's editors oversee subject areas in which they have extensive knowledge, whether from years of experience gained by working on that content or via study for an advanced degree. I promise not to spam you. The Zulu refer to the Eastern Cape as KwaXhosa which is translated to place of the Xhosa. 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 wordseither separately or conjoinedto refer to economic, social, physical, and linguistic features of certain aboriginal groups of southern and eastern Africa. ), Africa: Journal of the International African Institute. Both Xhosa and Zulu are an official languages in South Africa and Lesotho. Download your free PDF guide with 125 Italian travel phrases. 1. Xhosa uses a system of tones to distinguish words that would otherwise sound the same. In southern Africa, they came into contact with Khoisan-speaking people. and is made by putting the tongue just behind the front teeth. Kiga, Gusii, The name Khoisan is a compound word formed with the native words khoi "person" and san "forager", meaning 'persons who forage in the bush" or "bushmen". This distinctive linguistic characteristic was adopted by a number of neighbouring Bantu languages, such as Xhosa and Zulu in South Africa. The more notable characteristic is their depressor effect on the tone of the syllable.[19]. Other figures are the huge lightning bird (impundudu), and the gentleabantubomlambo aquatic human-like beings who accept into their family those who drown. With about 800 speakers in Tanzania, Hadza is no longer seen as a Khoisan language and appears to be unrelated to any other language. You can unsubscribe at any time. Yao, 9 reasons youre not fluentYET & how to fix it! This term, now considered derogatory, means stutterer in Dutch. They are typologically very similar to the Kxa languages (below), but have not been demonstrated to be related to them genealogically (the similarities may be an areal feature). They are called upon for guidance, support, or to turn the tide of fortune. 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. The murmur no longer shifts to the following vowel. 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. The /i/ vowel is long in the penultimate syllable and short in the last syllable.[16]. Tsonga, 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. All Khoisan languages but two are indigenous to southern Africa and belong to three language families. The Xhosa language is a member of the Bantu family and is closely related to Zulu. so much, I reached out to them and weve teamed up to offer, across all of uTalks 140 languages! Traill demonstrated this linguistic diversity in the data presented in the below table. All Rights Reserved. While every effort has been made to follow citation style rules, there may be some discrepancies. A preliminary classification of the !X and u'hasi dialects. Bonny Sands (1998) concluded that the family is not demonstrable with current evidence. Enchantment winds through the Xhosa language, dress and rituals. Emeritus Professor of African Studies; former Director, Institute for African Studies, University of Cologne. 1998. Thanks for reading and I hope you enjoyed this post. Only a few consonants, such as /b/, /m/, /n/, /r/, and /l/ can appear between vowels, and even fewer can appear at the end of words. Xhosa is the most widely distributed African language in South Africa, though the most widely spoken African language is Zulu. Literary works, including prose and poetry, are available in Xhosa, as are newspapers and magazines. Let us know where you'll be watching this weekend. English. [15], John Bennie was a Scottish Presbyterian missionary and early Xhosa linguist. The click consonant sounds are a typical and unique feature of the San and Khoikhoi languages. Tswana, If you like this site and find it useful, you can support it by making a donation via PayPal or Patreon, or by contributing in other ways. 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. Watch this video of Miriam Makebas singQongqothwane in Xhosa, also known as The Click Song. The word "Xhosa" is derived from the Khoisan language and means "angry men". Nyungwe, Like other Southern Bantu languages, Xhosa has borrowed words from the Khoisan languages, as well as from English and Afrikaans. Indeed, the use of the term 'Khoikhoi' meaning . Learn the local language with my unique 80/20 method. 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) languagessuch as Xhosa, Zulu, and Sotho in South Africa and Gciriku (Diriku), Yei (Yeye), and Mbukushu in Botswana and Namibiaand into Dahalo, a Cushitic (Afro-Asiatic) language of Kenya. Thus their language is variously said to be extinct or to have 18,000 speakers, to be Ju or to be Khoe. Because I believe in uTalk so much, I reached out to them and weve teamed up to offer you an exclusive 30% OFF reader discount across all of uTalks 140 languages! At the secondary level, instruction in schools serving Xhosa-speaking students is in English. The Nguni languages are unique among Bantu languages in that they have imploded "clicking" phonemes. secondary schools. Copyright 1995-2023 Southafrica.com. Additional phonemes use sequences of multiple letters. Accent I'm fluent in Xhosa. Therefore, the absolute duration of voicing is the same as in tenuis stops. 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. Dental clicks are represented by the letter c, alveolar clicks are indicated by q, and lateral clicks are written with the letter x. Vowel length is not always represented in writing. Southern Khoisan languages have a very high ratio of words containing clicks as compared to those that do not contain them. Can you reproduce these click types? The small town of De Aar is located in the central Groot Karoo along the railway line between Cape Town and Kimberley, which was established in the late 1800s. Xhosa is considered to be a Category II language in terms of difficulty for speakers of English. Kongo, The term Bushman as it is used to describe certain southern African hunter-gatherers is somewhat controversial because it is perceived as racist. [citation needed], Khoisan was proposed as one of the four families of African languages in Joseph Greenberg's classification (19491954, revised in 1963). This process can skip rightwards to non-local syllables (i.e. 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. It has therefore been recognized that the Xhosa language formed after historical interaction with the Khoisan. They are marked with an apostrophe //. The inventory is taken from Wikipedia. The following three are languages from the Khoe family, the Kxa family, and the Tuu family, respectively. Translate files. Swati and Ndebele, and mutually intelligible with them to some extent. The name Khoisan derives from the name of the Khoikhoi (people people or real people) group of South Africa and the San (Bushmen) group of Namibia. 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). These are typically written with characters such as and . Clicks are quite versatile as consonants, as they involve two articulations of the tongue which can operate partially independently. Khoisan languages are best known for their use of click consonants as phonemes. The language is an important part of Khois. Aspirated clicks become prenasalized ejected clicks. Subscribe to my newsletter to receive detailed travel guides, exclusive travel and language learning tips, priority access to giveaways and more! Eastern Cape, Western Cape, Free State and Northern Cape. The origin of Khoisan click consonants and their peculiarly African provenance therefore remains a mystery. Fricatives become affricated and, if voiceless, they become ejectives as well: mf is pronounced [pf], ndl is pronounced [nd], n+hl becomes ntl [nt], n+z becomes ndz [ndz], n+q becomes [n] etc. South Africa is the native land of Xhosa, which is spoken chiefly in the Eastern Cape Province. An alveolar click sounds like the popping of a cork made by putting the tongue just behind the ridge in back of the front teeth. Kirundi, Nama, in particular, has a long tradition of literacy. Nguni - a group of southern Bantu languages . Group of African language families with click consonants, "San language" redirects here. They refer to themselves as the amaXhosa and their language as isiXhosa. Xhosa nouns belong to 17 different classes, roughly based on semantic categories, e.g., there are classes for human beings, animals, plants, objects of various shapes, etc. National Treasures [1] [2] Khoisan is defined as those languages that have click consonants and do not belong to other African language families. uku-sebenz-is-el + wa -> ukusetyenziselwa "be used for"), but does not affect morpheme-initial consonants (i.e. Our editors will review what youve submitted and determine whether to revise the article. In Haacke, Wilfrid and Elderkin, Edward Derek (eds. 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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. work in Xhosa was published in 1823. Voiceless palatal plosive becomes voiced. is that you can jump around their extensive library of topics and choose what you want to learn, when you want, and at your own pace. In Xhosa, the verb "have" is represented by the word "nga" and its various forms. https://www.ethnologue.com/language/xho, Online Xhosa lessons Nkore, This distinctive linguistic characteristic was adopted by a number of neighbouring Bantu languages, such as Xhosa and Zulu in South Africa. Contact Us, 8.2 million people and by 11 million as a second language in South Africa, mostly in Eastern Cape Province and Transkei. The Bantu languages adopted the use of clicks from neighboring, displaced, or absorbed Khoisan populations (or from other Bantu languages), often through intermarriage, while the Dahalo are thought to have retained clicks from an earlier language when they shifted to speaking a Cushitic language; if so, the pre-Dahalo language may have been something like Hadza or Sandawe. Northern Sotho, The first two columns include words from the two Khoisan language isolates, Sandawe and Hadza. Ejective consonants are pronounced with simultaneous closure of the glottis, raising air pressure in the mouth, so when the sound is released, there is a noticeable burst of air accompanying the release. The San were formerly called Bushmen, (from . Grammatically, the southern Khoisan languages are generally analytic, having several inflectional morphemes, but not as many as the click languages of Tanzania. Various parts of speech that qualify a noun must agree with the noun according to its gender. , "A Lexicostatistical Approach towards Reconstructing Proto-Khoisan", "From modern Khoisan languages to Proto-Khoisan: The Value of Intermediate Reconstructions. if(typeof ez_ad_units != 'undefined'){ez_ad_units.push([[250,250],'omniglot_com-medrectangle-4','ezslot_1',141,'0','0'])};__ez_fad_position('div-gpt-ad-omniglot_com-medrectangle-4-0'); Download an alphabet chart for Xhosa (Excel). Northern Ndebele (South Africa), Besides pulmonic egressive sounds, which are found in all spoken languages, it has a series of ejective stops and one implosive stop. The language is also studied as a subject. Central Khoisan, the largest group, includes Nama (Khoekhoe, Khoekhoegowab) and Haiom (Saan) spoken in Namibia, and smaller languages spoken in the Kalahari desert of Botswana. Only phonemic, and thus reflected orthographically, for. On external genealogical relationships of the Khoe family. Sukuma, . 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. aquatic human-like beings who accept into their family those who drown. Most of the languages are endangered, and several are moribund or extinct. It is also spoken in Botswana and Lesotho. 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. Updates? These famous click sounds are found in Khoisan languages (alternative names include Khoesaan or Khoesan). Soga, Each click can combine with a number of accompanying articulations such as voicing, nasality, aspiration, and ejection producing a potentially large number of consonantal sounds: Nama has 20, Gwi 52, Juhoan 55 and Xo 83. Xhosa is one of four sister languages called Nguni Languages (Ndebele, Swati, Xhosa and Zulu) which are all mutually intelligible. [3] Ethnically, their speakers are the Khoikhoi and the San (Bushmen). In, Sands, Bonny. Proto-Central-Khoisan. Bennie, along with John Ross (another missionary), set up a printing press in the Tyhume Valley and the first printed works in Xhosa came out in 1823 from the Lovedale Press in the Alice region of the Eastern Cape. Thus, the word for people is abantu in all these languages. It has 18 click consonants (in comparison, Ju'hoan, spoken in Botswana and Namibia, has 48, and Taa, with roughly 4,000 speakers in Botswana, has 83). The normal word order in Xhosa is Verb-Object (the subject is part of the verb compound). 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. Here's 10 things you didn't know about this incredib, We're proud of you @KelvinvdLinde is awesome for learning key words and phrases in Xhosa, especially if you want to use it for travel purposes. In Xhosa culture, women are easily recognised by their heavy dress, matching turban and coloured dots . What I love most about uTalk is that you can jump around their extensive library of topics and choose what you want to learn, when you want, and at your own pace. Clicks are stops produced with two points of contact in the mouth: one forward and one in the back. The verb is modified by affixes to mark subject, object, tense, aspect and mood. Nyakyusa, Tone, stress and vowel length are not indicated. Ernst Oswald Johannes Westphal is known for his early rejection of the Khoisan language family (Starostin 2003). (Article 1 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights), Some corrections to this page by Michael Peter Fstumum, Information about Xhosa | This site is not affiliated with any government entity associated with a name similar to the site domain name. Language use is quite strong among the 20,000 speakers of Naro,[clarification needed] half of whom speak it as a second language. MustGo.com. Learning materials, Information about the Xhosa language Clicks are spreading to a few additional neighboring languages. For Black Panther, director Ryan Coogler "wanted to make it a priority to use Xhosa as much as possible" in the script, and provided dialect coaches for the film's actors. The Xhosa themselves are somewhat ambivalent about the use of their language in education. Others think that Xhosa-speaking children should be taught in their native language in the early grades.
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