Khoekhoe language

Status

Khoekhoe is a national language in Namibia. In Namibia and South Africa, state-owned broadcasting corporations produce and broadcast radio programmes in Khoekhoe.

It is estimated that only around 167,000 speakers of Khoekhoe remain in Africa, which makes it an endangered language. In 2019, the University of Cape Town 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
• Haiǁom
• ǂĀkhoe, itself a dialect cluster, and intermediate between Haiǁom and the Kalahari Khoe languages

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

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 three or four tones, or , which may occur on each mora (vowels and final nasal consonants). 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 tones), which have sandhi forms in certain syntactic environments. The most important melodies, in their citation and main sandhi forms, are as follows:

Stress

Within a phrase, lexical words receive greater stress than grammatical words. 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.

Pulmonic consonants

Orthography in brackets.

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 they are .

Ejective consonant

Beach (1938) reported that the Khoekhoe of the time had a velar lateral ejective affricate, , a common realisation or allophone of in languages with clicks. This sound no longer occurs in Khoekhoe but remains in its cousin Korana.

Click consonants

The clicks are doubly articulated consonants. 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 glottalized 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.

Wesleyan missionary Henry 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 Nama 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 moras, 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; they are otherwise pronounced the same. W is only used between vowels, though it may be replaced with b or p according to tone. 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 with the Lepsius letters that were later adopted as IPA symbols. The basic (tenuis) clicks are:

• ǀg (a single pipe) for a dental click
• ǁg (a double pipe) for a lateral click
• ǃg (a pipe with an under-dot, approximately an exclamation mark) for an alveolar click
• ǂg (a pipe with a double cross stroke) for a palatal click

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

Grammar

Nama has a subject–object–verb word order, three nouns classes (masculine/gu-class, feminine/di-class and neuter/n-class) and three grammatical numbers (singular, dual and plural). Pronominal enclitics are used to mark person, gender, and number on the noun phrases.

Person, gender and number markers

The PGN (person-gender-number) markers are enclitic pronouns that attach to noun phrases. The PGN markers distinguish first, second, and third person, masculine, feminine, and neuter gender, and singular, dual, and plural number. The PGN markers can be divided into nominative, object, and oblique paradigms.

Nominative

Object

(PGN + i)

Oblique

(PGN + a)

Articles

Khoekhoe has four definite articles: 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), and ko/km (assertive). These markers appear in matrix clauses, and appear after the subject.

Sample text

Following is a sample text in the Khoekhoe language.

Nē ǀkharib ǃnâ da ge ǁGûn tsî ǀGaen tsî doan tsîn; tsî ǀNopodi tsî ǀKhenadi tsî ǀhuigu tsî ǀAmin tsîn; tsî !kharagagu 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.