THE BEAUTIFUL CLICK LANGUAGES OF AFRICA
#khoisan #hadzabe #xhosa #clicksounds #zulu #sandawe
The click languages of Africa are lovely to hear. The Khoisan, the Hadzabe, the Zulu, the Sandawe, the Xhosa and the Tswana languages all contain click sounds in varying degrees. All but one clicking language can be found in Africa, which is fantastic. Clicks appear in all three Khoisan language groups of southern Africa, and they may be the most common consonant. To a lesser extent, they are found in three neighboring Bantu language groups that inherited them from Khoisan, either directly or indirectly. In the southeast, in eastern South Africa, Eswatini, Lesotho, Zimbabwe, and southern Mozambique, they were adopted from a Tuu language (or languages) by the languages of the Nguni cluster (especially Zulu, Xhosa, and Phuthi, but also to a lesser extent Swazi and Ndebele), and spread from them in a reduced fashion to the Zulu-based pidgin Fanagalo, Sesotho, Tsonga, Ronga, the Mzimba dialect of Tumbuka, and more recently to Ndau and urban varieties of Pedi, where the spread of The second point of transfer was near the Caprivi Strip and the Okavango River, where the Yeyi language appears to have borrowed clicks from a West Kalahari Khoe language; a separate development resulted in a smaller click inventory in the neighboring Mbukushu, Kwangali, Gciriku, Kuhane, and Fwe languages of Angola, Namibia, Botswana, and Zambia.These sounds appear not just in imported vocabulary, but also in native Bantu words, in Nguni at least partially due to a form of word taboo known as hlonipha. Some creolized Afrikaans dialects, such as Oorlams, still include clicks in Khoekhoe words.
