Xhosa language, Xhosa formerly spelled Xosa, a Bantu language spoken by seven million people in South Africa, especially in Eastern province. Corrections? Although mutually intelligible, they are considered to be separate languages for political and cultural reasons. A palatal click is a sharp pop made by drawing the tongue down quickly from the roof of the mouth. 3. Their use in education has been governed by legislation, beginning with the Bantu Education Act, 1953.[12]. Forming part of Durban's vibrant Golden Mile, the Bay of Plenty lies at the heart of the beachfront, with high-rise hotels and apartment buildings making the most of the stunning sea view. The sound system of Nama is characterized by an abundance of click consonants. Xhosa Definition & Meaning - Merriam-Webster Lingala, Take a look at Article 1 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in Xhosa. Group of African language families with click consonants, "San language" redirects here. The Xhosa people, or Xhosa-speaking people (/ k s , k o s /; Xhosa pronunciation: [ksa] ()) are a Nguni ethnic group whose traditional homeland is primarily the Cape Provinces of South Africa.They are the second largest ethnic group in Southern Africa and are native speakers of the IsiXhosa language. In, Treis, Yvonne. One of the main reasons for the decline is that bilingual Khoisan speakers shift to the dominant language of the area and stop teaching the language to their children. Xhosa may refer to: Xhosa people, a nation, and ethnic group, who live in south-central and southeasterly region of South Africa. The local Khoisan children speak mainly Afrikaans but Katrina Esau hopes this will change over time . Similarly, the tenuis (plain) clicks are often glottalised, with a long voice onset time, but that is uncommon. 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. Makhuwa, Konjo, #VisitSouthAfrica https://t.co/EHxIRKzU37, RT @FIAFormulaE: The Rainbow Nation #CapeTownEPrix #VisitSouthAfrica https://t.co/A4fSLf2jvP, Hello Cape Town [12], Xhosa is the most widely distributed African language in South Africa, though the most widely spoken African language is Zulu. [12] It is the second most common Bantu home language in South Africa as a whole. Khoisan Last but not least is the Khoisan family with between 40 - 70 members. In the Marvel Cinematic Universe films Captain America: Civil War, Black Panther, Avengers: Infinity War, Avengers: Endgame, and Black Panther: Wakanda Forever, the language spoken in the fictional African nation of Wakanda is Xhosa. The last is a lateral click with the tongue at the side of the mouth. By Mark Dingemanse [GFDL, CC-BY-SA-3.0 or CC BY 2.5], via Wikimedia Commons. Zigula, Xhosa, which is also known as Xosa or Koosa, is a clicking language. Khoisan languages, a unique group of African languages spoken mainly in southern Africa, with two outlying languages found in eastern Africa. Bukusu, Release of the forward closure results in a pop-like sound. 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. Linguistics 112 lecture, Department of Linguistics. Starostin (2013) gives the following classification of the Khoisan "macrofamily," which he considers to be a single coherent language family. . Xhosa - Wikipedia Xhosa is closely related to Zulu, 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. Tones are rarely marked in the written language, but they can be indicated a [], [], [], []. Tone, stress and vowel length are not indicated. The ceremonial slaughtering of animals is one of the many ways by which ancestors are invoked. Xhosa is one of four sister languages called Nguni Languages (Ndebele, Swati, Xhosa and Zulu) which are all mutually intelligible. The spirits of those who have passed on are honoured in rituals and ceremonies. However, some of the letters have a different pronunciation from English. [8] Xhosa is spoken as a first language by approximately 10 million people and as a second language by another 11 million, mostly in South Africa, particularly in Eastern Cape, Western Cape, Northern Cape and Gauteng, and also in parts of Zimbabwe and Lesotho. 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. Copyright 19982023 Simon Ager | Email: | Hosted by Kualo, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xhosa_language, https://www.memrise.com/course/1572/xhosa-an-intro/, http://xhosaculture.co.za/about-us/learn-xhosa/, https://www.twinkl.co.za/resources/south-africa-resources/isixhosa-foundation-phase-english-south-africa-suid-afrika/2, http://www.freelang.net/dictionary/xhosa.php, http://www.salanguages.com/isixhosa/xhowrd.htm, http://www.southafricalogue.com/travel-tips/south-african-phrases-xhosa.html. The status of Xhosa, like all other African languages in the Republic of South Africa, is complex. She hypothesizes that this took place within efforts to prevent the spread of English during European colonization and prevent the entrance of the majority into the middle class.[7]. Proto-Central-Khoisan. 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. Anthony Traill noted the Khoisan languages' extreme variation. The 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries, however, have witnessed the death of many of the recorded languages and dialects, and their distribution is now largely confined to Botswana and Namibia. Planning a trip? The fact that many of the surviving languages are endangered and some are even on the point of extinction bears testimony to inexorable social, economic, linguistic, and demographic forces that continue to marginalize and consume indigenous linguistic and cultural minorities. Voiceless palatal plosive becomes voiced. In Xhosa culture, women are easily recognised by their heavy dress, matching turban and coloured dots . Read More; development. De Aar is the commercial center for the wool production and livestock farming industry in this semi-arid region of South Africa. They are marked with an apostrophe //. A Haiom language is listed in most Khoisan references. Tower of Babel | Fang, [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]. The basic clicks are four: dental (|), alveolar (! Its speakers and people belonging to the group are called isiXhosa. Save my name, email, and website in this browser for the next time I comment. No change when the following consonant is itself a nasal. Please refer to the appropriate style manual or other sources if you have any questions. "Khoisan." Ethnologue lists 27 Khoisan languages which are spoken by half a million people or less. Marking of the plural number depends on the noun class. Xhosa language, one of the 11 official languages of South Africa, principally spoken by the Xhosa people. The name Khoisan derives from the name of the Khoe-Khoe (also known as the Hottentot) group of South Africa and the San (Bushmen) group of Namibia. They are now held to comprise three distinct language families and two language isolates. The chart below (taken from Some elements of the structure of the Xhosa verb) shows some of the possible slots for prefixes and suffixes. 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. The Khoisan, or Click, linguistic family is made up of three branches: the Khoisan languages of the San (Bushmen) and Khoikhoi, spoken in various parts of sub-Saharan Africa; Sandawe, a language found in E Africa; and Hatsa (Hadzane or Hadzapi), also spoken in E Africa. With about 800 speakers in Tanzania, Hadza is no longer seen as a Khoisan language and appears to be unrelated to any other language. Views on views on views (Click here for an audio sample of the extinct !Ora language.) Planning a trip? [14] Also, a small community of Xhosa speakers (18,000) live in Quthing District, Lesotho.[15]. Believed to be the oldest of the four language families, it is the smallest of the four and is found mainly in Southern Africa. Those who speak this language typically form part of the ethnic group called the amaXhosa and refer to their language as isiXhosa. 15% of its vocabulary is estimated to be of Khoekhoe (Khoisan) origin. When visiting the Eastern Cape be sure to ask an amaXhosa to teach you a few phrases, they are certain to be willing to share their unique language with you. They refer to themselves as the amaXhosa and their language as isiXhosa. The Khoikhoi were once called Hottentots by Europeans. 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. Xhosa Language in South Africa | SouthAfrica.com OshiWambo, People who speak Xhosa as their second language number about 11 million. nangokweemfanelo. This produces something like the English tut-tut. Nguni - a group of southern Bantu languages . This distinctive linguistic characteristic was adopted by a number of neighbouring Bantu languages, such as Xhosa and Zulu in South Africa. Long vowels are phonemic but are usually not written except for and , which are each sequences of two vowels with different tones that are realized as long vowels with contour tones ( highlow = falling, lowhigh = rising). A Beginners Guide Khoisan: Africas Clicking Languages. See also Khoisan languages, which contains several audio clips. Khoisan - Traduo em ingls - exemplos portugus | Reverso Context The orthographic b in mb is the voiced plosive [mb]. Umbundu, Both Xhosa and Zulu are an official languages in South Africa and Lesotho. The original and unique use of clicks in the Khoisan languages has invited speculation that these unusual sounds might reflect an earlier stage in the evolution of language when sounds were natural vocal adaptations to the environment. Ganda/Luganda, MustGo.com. 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. Most of the languages are endangered, and several are moribund or extinct. Below is a table of Xhosa consonants. Xhosa is an unusual and attractive sounding language, though difficult to master. XXhosa tradition is an extremely powerful social force binding together these people of Eastern Cape province, most evident in Xhosa beliefs revering their ancestors. African Click Languages: The Khoisan's Secret Tales - Africa Freak The following three are languages from the Khoe family, the Kxa family, and the Tuu family, respectively. Learn the local language with my unique 80/20 method. In, Winter, J.C. 1981. Venda, "Die Khoisan-Familie." The Zulu refer to the Eastern Cape as KwaXhosa which is translated to place of the Xhosa. There are two groups of languages in southern Africa that have clicks: the Khoisan languages and certain languages of the Niger-Congo family, most notably Zulu and Xhosa. Click here to claim your exclusive 30% discount. They are known as the Saa by the Nama, and this is the source of the word San. 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. The Khoisan people have a unique language that is characterized by clicking sounds made with the tongue and mouth. 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". How difficult is it to learn Xhosa? Start learning here! (They may also be voiced between vowels in some speaking styles.) 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. Accent I'm fluent in Xhosa. Hidden Languages of the World: Xhosa Language - Day Translations Blog Xhosa is, to a large extent, mutually intelligible with Zulu and with other Nguni languages to a lesser extent. Southern Khoisan languages have a very high ratio of words containing clicks as compared to those that do not contain them. is awesome for learning key words and phrases in Xhosa, especially if you want to use it for travel purposes. A Beginner's Guide Khoisan: Africa's Clicking Languages Archaeological evidence suggests that the Khoisan people appeared in southern Africa some 60,000 years ago. The first printed for $0.07/word. Languages Gulper/Khoisan Peoples/About World Languages/Wikipedia/The Week. At the secondary level, instruction in schools serving Xhosa-speaking students is in English. Author of, Professor Emeritus, Department of Linguistics, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa. The pocket of air produced by the resulting enclosure is rarefied by the sucking action of the tongue. The ceremonial slaughtering of animals is one of the many ways by which ancestors are invoked. [8] Despite their shared clicks, the Khoisan languages diverge significantly from each other. The Xhosa, formerly called Kaffir or Kafir (Arabic for infidel), are a cluster of related peoples who have inhabited Eastern Cape Province and Transkei, South Africa, since before the 16th century. The branches that were once considered part of so-called Khoisan are now considered independent families, since it has not been demonstrated that they are related according to the standard comparative method. When consonants are prenasalised, their pronunciation and spelling may change. Ngqika is considered to be the standard variety. https://www.ethnologue.com/language/xho, Online Xhosa lessons However, not all noun classes can be so easily defined. iliso (eye), uluhlu (list). The language is also rich in idioms. In the International Phonetic Alphabet, clicks are represented by placing the assigned symbol for the place of click articulation to the left of a symbol for a nonclick sound at the same place of articulation. Xhosa culture, rituals, food, traditions, clans, customs, language and Learn the local language with her 80/20 method for less than the cost of eating at a tourist trap restaurant Start learning today! Xhosa alphabet, pronunciation and language - Omniglot Italian for Confident Conversations (A2-B2). Xhosa traditions; Eastern Cape; Nguni; Khoisan; culture; ancestor Thanks for reading and I hope you enjoyed this post. Bonke abantu bazalwa bekhululekile belingana ngesidima 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. Photography and infographics cannot be used without permission.Privacy Policy | Cookie Policy | Terms and Conditions, Language Learning for Travellers & Heritage Learners, Italian Travel Phrases Cheat-Sheet! Xhosa (isiXhosa) is the southernmost member of the Bantoid group of the Niger-Congo language family in Africa. 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. Additional phonemes use sequences of multiple letters. Click consonants can be modified in a variety of ways. Don't let the learning stop here. Clicks are spreading to a few additional neighboring languages. The prenasalized versions have a very short voicing at the onset which then releases in an ejective, like the prenasalized affricates, while the phonemically nasal clicks have a very long voicing through the consonant. It's a wrap! 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. In 1996[update], the literacy rate for first-language Xhosa speakers was estimated at 50%.[15]. Like other Southern Bantu languages, Xhosa has borrowed words from the Khoisan languages, as well as from English and Afrikaans. I will never give away, trade or sell your email address. 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. [12] However, this classification is not widely accepted. The Khoisan I Meeting the Khoisan I Khoisan Click Language Family words | Choose your English to Xhosa translation service. [13] There is a small but significant Xhosa community of about 200,000 in Zimbabwe. Masaaba, are about 8.2 million native speakers of Xhosa, and another 11 million Duala, [9] It has perhaps the heaviest functional load of click consonants in a Bantu language (approximately tied with Yeyi), with one count finding that 10% of basic vocabulary items contained a click.[10]. South Africa is the native land of Xhosa, which is spoken chiefly in the Eastern Cape Province. There are a number of print publications in Xhosa, or in Xhosa and English. Isewell [CC BY-SA 2.5], via Wikimedia Commons. Clicks are stops produced with two points of contact in the mouth: one forward and one in the back. These are the only languages known to have clicks in normal vocabulary. Tradues em contexto de "Khoisan" en portugus-ingls da Reverso Context : Palavras-chave: Khoisan; reconciliation; identity; narrative; communication. 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. 1991). Xhosa | South African History Online They are not prenasalized, as can be seen in words such as , Incorrectly described as glottal clicks by, Last edited on 25 February 2023, at 23:55, "Xhosa alphabet, pronunciation and language", "South Africa Population grows to 44.8 Million", "Wakanda Is a Fake Country, but the African Language in 'Black Panther' is Real", Xhosa basic lexicon at the Global Lexicostatistical Database, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Xhosa_language&oldid=1141620598, [mp], [nt], [nt], [k], [n], [n], [n]. http://glosbe.com/en/xh/ 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. Implosive consonants Nande, The Khoe family appears to have migrated to southern Africa not long before the Bantu expansion. Pair them with vowels, tones, and other constants and you've got a wide variety of sounds and meanings. The /i/ vowel is long in the penultimate syllable and short in the last syllable.[16]. They are called upon for guidance, support, or to turn the tide of fortune. films, plays and songs. 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. 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. Xhosa has three basic clicks . The release of the forward closure results in a pop-like sound. [15], John Bennie was a Scottish Presbyterian missionary and early Xhosa linguist. Omniglot is how I make my living. Otherwise, they tend to be tenuis (plain) stops. The sound system of Xhosa contains three types of click sounds borrowed from the neighbouring Khoisan languages. All Khoisan languages but two are indigenous to southern Africa and belong to three language families. 1997. Xhosa uses a system of tones to distinguish words that would otherwise sound the same. The name Khoisan is a compound word formed with the native words khoiperson and sanforager, meaning persons who forage in the bush or bushmen. There is also the South Cushitic language Dahalo in Kenya, which has dental clicks in a few score words, and an extinct and presumably artificial Australian ritual language called Damin, which had only nasal clicks. 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. 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. If a woman has children, whom she has raised to be adults, then it is usual to find her seated among her peers smoking a long-handled pipe. It forms part of the ornamentation that reflects the different stages of a woman, s life. So by clicking on these links you can help to support this site. In A. Traill (ed. 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. Beadwork similar to the Ndebele is an integral aspect of Xhosa tradition. By creating an account, I agree to theTerms of service and Privacy policy. 9 reasons youre not fluentYET & how to fix it! After migrating to southern Africa, the Xhosa and Zulu adopted the click consonants unique to the Khoisan and loaned some words. The X and H languages are even more complex. The language of instruction at universities in South Africa is English or Afrikaans (to a diminishing extent[21]), and Xhosa is taught as a subject, both for native and for non-native speakers. Language/Xhosa/Grammar/How-to-Use-Have - polyglotclub.com 'The adaptation of non-click consonants in Xhosa'. They are currently restricted to the Kalahari Desert, primarily in Namibia and Botswana, and to the Rift Valley in central Tanzania.[2]. The majority of languages which contain clicks originate with the Khoisan languages. Tswana, Subscribe to my newsletter to receive detailed travel guides, exclusive travel and language learning tips, priority access to giveaways and more! In South Africa a variation of this process allowed the Khoisan languages to exert a powerful linguistic influence on the dominant languages before they disappeared, leaving Afrikaans and some Bantu languages with a number of distinctive Khoisan features. It is spoken by the Xhosa people in South Africa, and has around 8 million speakers. However, tones are usually not indicated in writing. Consequently, the languages with the greatest numbers of consonants in the world are Khoisan. Sources Besides clicks, Khoisan languages have non-click consonants, giving rise to very complex consonantal systems which are amongst the largest in the world. (Their numbers have been included under Nama above.) 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). 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. Interestingly, the word Xhosa is from the Khoisan language and means The angry men. University of Cambridge Language Centre Resources - Xhosa Various parts of speech that qualify a noun must agree with the noun according to its gender. Clicks are stops produced with two points of contact in the mouth: one forward and one in the back. Xhosa's click consonants were most likely borrowed from the Khoisan 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. Khoisan languages, a unique group of African languages spoken mainly in southern Africa, with two outlying languages found in eastern Africa. ), palatal (), and lateral (). Ernst Oswald Johannes Westphal is known for his early rejection of the Khoisan language family (Starostin 2003). document.getElementById( "ak_js_1" ).setAttribute( "value", ( new Date() ).getTime() ); This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. I promise not to spam you. The red letters are orthographic representations of the sounds. 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. Learning materials, Information about the Xhosa language Language use is quite strong among the 20,000 speakers of Naro,[clarification needed] half of whom speak it as a second language. According to this hypothesis, clicks might have originally served as onomatopoetic imitations of naturally occurring sounds. It is also taught in universities. Gwere, Michele creates language learning guides and courses for travel. In, Gldemann, Tom and Rainer Vossen. There are several places of articulation at which click consonants occur, as shown in the table below. magazines and newspapers in Xhosa, as well as TV and radio programmes, Occasionally other languages are said by laypeople to have "click" sounds. The verb root occupies the 0 position. Nama is used in education and in the media. The Xhosa language (Isixhosa), of which there are variations, is part of the Nguni language group. Eastern Cape, Western Cape, Free State and Northern Cape. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xhosa_language 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). 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. Most of the languages are unwritten, but Nama and Naro have Latin-based orthographies. 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. The normal word order in Xhosa is Verb-Object (the subject is part of the verb compound). These sounds were borrowed from the Khoisan languages of the original inhabitants of the area. The language is also studied as a subject. According to the 2011 census there 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. Luvale, F https://t.co/s7IkqA9Utl, It feels good to have @KevinHart4real also known as Mpho here in Johannesburg, South Africa. tsk! The Juhoan language has 48 click consonants among nearly as many non-click consonants, strident and pharyngealized vowels, and four tones. Below are some common words and sentences in Xhosa.