is xhosa a khoisan language

The Khoisan languages (/ksn/; also Khoesan or Khoesaan) are a number of African languages once classified together, originally by Joseph Greenberg. Haya, Umbundu, All education at the university level is in English or Afrikaans. Additional phonemes use sequences of multiple letters. The first printed Songe, Digo, At present, Xhosa is used as the main language of instruction in many primary schools and some secondary schools, but is largely replaced by English after the early primary grades, even in schools mainly serving Xhosa-speaking communities. Khoisan / k s n /, or Khoe-Sn (pronounced [kxoesan]), 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 Khoekhoen (formerly "Khoikhoi") and the Sn or Skhoen (Saake in the Nng language).. http://www.freelang.net/dictionary/xhosa.php Every single click in Miriam Makebas Click Song, which is in Xhosa, is a sound that was borrowed from a neighbouring language and swapped into existing words and not all that long ago, either. New Haven: Compass Publishing Company. Xhosa (/ks, kos/,[5][6][7] Xhosa pronunciation:[ksa]), formerly spelled Xosa and also known by its local name isiXhosa, is a Nguni language and one of the official languages of South Africa and Zimbabwe. Tuu: A New Name for the Southern Khoisan Family, in Tom Gldemann (ed.). The following table gives an overview of Xhosa noun classes, arranged according to singular-plural pairs. Nama is used in education and in the media. They are descended from the Nguni, who began migrating south from central and northern Africa more than a thousand years ago. Kikuyu, Clicks sas 1. Fricatives become affricates. magazines and newspapers in Xhosa, as well as TV and radio programmes, The Khoisan languages differ in the number of such modifications from a low of 20 in Nama to a high of 83 in Kxoe. The murmured clicks, plosives and affricates are only partially voiced, with the following vowel murmured for some speakers. By Mark Dingemanse [GFDL, CC-BY-SA-3.0 or CC BY 2.5], via Wikimedia Commons. As of 2003[update] approximately 5.3million Xhosa-speakers, the majority, live in the Eastern Cape, followed by the Western Cape (approximately 2million), Gauteng (671,045), the Free State (246,192), KwaZulu-Natal (219,826), North West (214,461), Mpumalanga (46,553), the Northern Cape (51,228), and Limpopo (14,225). The local Khoisan children speak mainly Afrikaans but Katrina Esau hopes this will change over time . [citation needed], Khoisan was proposed as one of the four families of African languages in Joseph Greenberg's classification (19491954, revised in 1963). [22], Proportion of the South African population that speaks Xhosa at home, These are analogous to the slack-voice nasals mh, nh, etc. They Corrections? 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. Featuring handcraft https://t.co/GiM3yZdgvg, Situated in Cape Town Hope street studios, lies the excellent & craftmanship of David Dindi Leather collection, a s https://t.co/zlW7cX54f8, Self-taught designer Nondwe Nyathi of Indwe Designs, draws inspiration from the elegant Blue crane, its stately pre https://t.co/Srk6KNK2lM, Cool Tabs A sustainable & profitable business owned by Aretha Doyle, re-purposes soda can tabs and transforms them https://t.co/qCZyAieYy7, SA Tourisms sustainability village at AGES showcases proudly S.A eco and environmentally friendly products. Therefore, Xhosa and Zulu people frequently understand one another, even if they are each speaking their mother tongue. There are no definite or indefinite articles. With about 800 speakers in Tanzania, Hadza is no longer seen as a Khoisan language and appears to be unrelated to any other language. 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. 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. Genetically, the Hadza people are unrelated to the Khoisan peoples of Southern Africa, and their closest relatives may be among the Pygmies of Central Africa. 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. As with other South African languages, Xhosa is characterized by respectful forms of address for elders and in-laws. The Xhosa number approximately 7.1-million, the majority of whom live in Eastern Cape, and ancient traditions remain strong in this proud people. The Xhosa noun consists of two essential parts, the prefix and the stem. Aspirated clicks become prenasalized ejected clicks. 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. In fact, these differences are so pronounced as to suggest that in a linguistic discussion the term Khoisan should be used only in a loose typological sense to refer to a group of languages that share some features of sound structure (mainly involving clicks) and not as the name of a language family in the strict sensesuch as Indo-European, Sino-Tibetan, or Bantuin which some shared features are found at all levels of structure and these features are assumed to have been inherited from a common ancestral language. North Khoisan is spoken by hunter-gatherers mainly in Namibia. . Of all the Khoisan languages, only Nama enjoys official recognition. Fang, Janina Brutt-Griffler claims, "given that such colonial borders were generally arbitrarily drawn, they grouped large numbers of ethnic groups that spoke many languages." Its great for beginners getting started in a language and invaluable for intermediates looking to fill in gaps in their vocabulary and pronunciation. are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another The Xhosa themselves are somewhat ambivalent about the use of their language in education. It is a Methodist hymn written in Xhosa by Enoch Sontonga in 1897. The Xhosa language is a member of the Bantu family and is closely related to Zulu. 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. Xhosa, It is spoken by the Xhosa people in South Africa, and has around 8 million speakers. "History of Click-Speaking Populations of Africa Inferred from mtDNA and Y Chromosome Genetic Variation", "The Kxa Family: A New Khoisan Genealogy", . It's a wrap! The Khoikhoi were once called Hottentots by Europeans. Using the prefixes, nouns can be grouped into noun classes, which are numbered consecutively, to ease comparison with other Bantu languages. 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. 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. Literary works, including prose and poetry, are available in Xhosa, as are newspapers and magazines. The more notable characteristic is their depressor effect on the tone of the syllable.[19]. Kamba, Xhosa (formerly spelled Xosa) is an official language of South Africa, natively spoken by around 7.9 million people which is about around 16% of the population of South Africa. 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. Bonny Sands (1998) concluded that the family is not demonstrable with current evidence. Rafiki, the sagely mandrill chants Xhosa on The Lion King and its reboot. Khoisan languages are best known for their use of click consonants as phonemes. Not all languages using clicks as phonemes are considered Khoisan. (Article 1 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights), Some corrections to this page by Michael Peter Fstumum, Information about Xhosa | Xhosa is a Bantu language that is closely related to Ndebele and Swazi and is characterized by the unique click sounds for some letters. 1988. 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. But, as with any language, Xhosa had a rich history of oral traditions from which the society taught, informed, and entertained one another. The 'X' in Xhosa, for example, represents a type of . Therefore, the absolute duration of voicing is the same as in tenuis stops. It is a Bantu language closely related to Zulu, Swazi, and Ndebele. It has therefore been recognized that the Xhosa language formed after historical interaction with the Khoisan. Only phonemic, and thus reflected orthographically, for. De Aar is the commercial center for the wool production and livestock farming industry in this semi-arid region of South Africa. Beadwork similar to the Ndebele is an integral aspect of Xhosa tradition. In, Honken, Henry. Xhosa has the following clicks consonants which can be modified in a variety of ways, such as aspirated, breathy-voiced or nasalized. Because Xhosa and Zulu are both classed as Bantu languages, they are quite similar. Thus their language is variously said to be extinct or to have 18,000 speakers, to be Ju or to be Khoe. Updates? There are books, It is also taught in universities. Sukuma, Xhosa language, Xhosa formerly spelled Xosa, a Bantu language spoken by seven million people in South Africa, especially in Eastern province. [15], John Bennie was a Scottish Presbyterian missionary and early Xhosa linguist. Xhosa's click consonants were most likely borrowed from the Khoisan Nama, the largest Khoisan language, is officially recognized in Namibia and is taught at universities. 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. Enchantment winds through the Xhosa language, dress and rituals. Breathy-voiced consonants are produced when the vocal cords vibrate, as they do in normal voicing, but are held further apart, so that a volume of air escapes between them. How difficult is it to learn Xhosa? 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". They are truly voiced only after nasals, but the oral occlusion is then very short in stops, and it usually does not occur at all in clicks. Like other Bantu languages, Xhosa is rich in expressions, idioms, and proverbs. They are called upon for guidance, support, or to turn the tide of fortune. Nkore, Ikizu, Gldemann, Tom. All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. Xhosa has an inventory of ten vowels: [a], [~e], [i], [~o] and [u] written a, e, i, o and u in order, all occurring in both long and short. This ritual vocabulary of the Lardil of Australia contains some words with clicks together with other peculiar sounds, but the use of clicks is limited, and they have a symbolic value in addition to their linguistic function. Let us know if you have suggestions to improve this article (requires login). The orthographic b in mb is the voiced plosive [mb]. Besides pulmonic egressive sounds, which are found in all spoken languages, it has a series of ejective stops and one implosive stop. [13] There is a small but significant Xhosa community of about 200,000 in Zimbabwe. There are a number of print publications in Xhosa, or in Xhosa and English. Believed to be the oldest of the four language families, it is the smallest of the four and is found mainly in Southern Africa. The verb is modified by affixes to mark subject, object, tense, aspect and mood. One puzzling feature of the Khoisan languages is that, despite some uniformity in their use of clicks, they differ considerably among themselves in aspects such as word formation, sentence structure, and vocabulary. South Africa is the native land of Xhosa, which is spoken chiefly in the Eastern Cape Province. Baucom, Kenneth L. 1974. The language is marked by the large number of click consonant sounds used. 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. Most syllables end in a vowel, and there are no consonant clusters. 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. Omniglot is how I make my living. [6] Dimmendaal (2008) summarized the general view with, "it has to be concluded that Greenberg's intuitions on the genetic unity of Khoisan could not be confirmed by subsequent research. The language is an important part of Khois. Tonga, Swati and Ndebele, and mutually intelligible with them to some extent. It is also spoken in Botswana and Lesotho. Two languages of east Africa, those of the Sandawe and Hadza, originally were also classified as Khoisan, although their speakers are ethnically neither Khoikhoi nor San. They are thought to have migrated to this region along the east coast of Africa and through central Africa. Tone, stress and vowel length are not indicated. This is usually a misnomer for ejective consonants, which are found across much of the world, or is a reference to paralinguistic use of clicks such as English tsk! . 15% of its vocabulary is estimated to be of Khoekhoe (Khoisan) origin. The Khoisan languages ( / ksn /; also Khoesan or Khoesaan) are a number of African languages once classified together, originally by Joseph Greenberg. so much, I reached out to them and weve teamed up to offer, across all of uTalks 140 languages! in a spirit of brotherhood. Konjo, tsk! This means I earn a commission if you click on any of them and buy something. , "A Lexicostatistical Approach towards Reconstructing Proto-Khoisan", "From modern Khoisan languages to Proto-Khoisan: The Value of Intermediate Reconstructions. [1] [2] Khoisan is defined as those languages that have click consonants and do not belong to other African language families. Tswa, It forms part of the ornamentation that reflects the different stages of a woman, s life. Luchazi, The word lives on, however, in the names of several African animal and plant species, such as the Hottentot Fig or Carpobrotus. As an example, the composition of the verb In the sentence Un-ntwana u-ya-wa-sel-a ama-nzi One child drinks water is shown below. As a balance to consonant complexity, strict rules restrict clicks and most of the non-clicks to the beginning of a word being followed always by a vowel. Gusii, The palatalization process only applies once, as evidenced by ukuphuphumisa+wa -> ukuphuphunyiswa "to be made to overflow", instead of the illicit alternative, *ukuphutshunyiswa. They write new content and verify and edit content received from contributors. 2005. The official name of the language is isiXhosa, with the key word Xhosa being derived from the Khoisan Language.

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