Khwe language - WikiHQ

Khwe ( ; also rendered Kxoe, Khoe and Khwedam) is a dialect continuum of the Khoe branch of the Khoe-Kwadi family of Namibia, Angola, Botswana, South Africa, and parts of Zambia, with some 8,000 speakers.

In 2000, the meeting of the Working Group of Indigenous Minorities in South Africa (WIMSA) produced the Penduka Declaration on the Standardisation of Ju and Khoe Languages, which recommends Khwe be classified as part of the Central Khoe-San family, a cluster language comprising Khwe, ǁAni and Buga.

Khwe is the preferred spelling as recommended by the Penduka Declaration,

Other names and spellings of ǁAni include ǀ᪶Anda, Gǀanda, Handá, Gani and Tanne with various combinations of -kwe/khwe/khoe and -dam.

History

The Khwe-speaking population has resided around the "bush" in areas of sub-Saharan Africa for several thousand years. Testimonies from living Khwe speakers note that their ancestors have come from the Tsodilo Hills, in the Okavango Delta, where they primarily used hunter-gatherer techniques for subsistence. The first Bantu-speaking education that Khwe speakers received was in 1970 at a settlement in Mùtcʼiku, a settlement proximate the Okavango River. The Bantu language speakers of the Okavango and Zambezi regions migrated to the area during the Bantu Migration, and came in contact with the native Khoe speakers in the area.

The Khwe speakers' distribution in the greater Kavango-Zambezi region influenced clicks in Khoisan languages, some argue. The largest known Khwe settlements are Mutc'iku, located adjacent to the Okavango River, and Gudigoa in Botswana. including former members of the 31 Battalion (SWATF) who fought under the South African Defence Force in the Namibian War, were settled in a tent town in Schmidtsdrift, South Africa. In 2003, the majority of this community relocated to Platfontein, outside Kimberley, following the Schmidtsdrift Community Land Claim.

Phonology

Khwe has 70 phonemic consonants, including 36 clicks, as well as 25 vowel phonemes, including diphthongs and nasalised vowels. Khwe's tone system has been analysed as containing 9 syllabic tones (3 register and 6 contour), although more recent proposed analyses identify only 3 lexical tones, high, mid and low, with the mora as the basic unit of phonological structure. Tone sandhi processes are common in Khwe and related languages.

Vowels

{| class="wikitable" style=text-align:center

|+ Khwe vowels

! !!Front

!Central!!Back

!Close

| ||

!Close-mid

| rowspan="2" |

!Open-mid

!Open

{| class="wikitable" style="text-align: center"

! colspan="5" |Diphthongs

!Close

|ui

|ue

|uɛ

|ua

! rowspan="2" |Close-mid

|ei

|eu

|oe

|oɛ

|oa

!Open

|ae

|ao

/o/ is realized as [o] when lengthened, but is realized as [ɔ] if it is pronounced short.
Three nasal vowels are recognized as /ã ĩ ũ/. A nasal /õ/ also exists, but only in diphthongs as /õã/.
Nasal diphthongs include /ãĩ, ũĩ, ãũ, õã/.
/oɛ/ and /uɛ/ are free in variation with /oe/ and /ue/, but only dependent upon speakers.

Consonants

{| class="wikitable" style="text-align:center"

|+Khwe pulmonic consonants

! colspan="2" rowspan="2" |

! rowspan="2" |Labial

! rowspan="2" |Alveolar

! rowspan="2" |Post- alveolar

! rowspan="2" |Palatal

! colspan="2" |Velar

! rowspan="2" |Uvular

! rowspan="2" |Glottal

!plain

!pal.

! colspan="2" |Nasal

! rowspan="5" |Plosive

!voiceless

!aspirated

!ejective

| colspan="2" |

!voiced

!prenasal

! rowspan="4" |Affricate

!voiceless

| colspan="2" |

!voiced

| colspan="2" |

!velar

| colspan="2" |

!ejective

! rowspan="2" |Fricative

!voiceless

!voiced

| colspan="2" |

! colspan="2" |Trill

| colspan="2" |

! colspan="2" |Approximant

| ()

/ʃ/ is realized as [ç] in Buma-Khwe, but as [s] in ǁXo-Khwe and Buga-Khwe, and as [ʃ] in ǁXom-Khwe.
/l/ is only found in borrowings.

Clicks

Khoe click inventories generally combine four anterior constrictions types with nine to eleven anterior constrictions. The exact size of the click inventory in Khwe is unclear. Köhler established an inventory of 36 click phonemes, from combinations of four influxes /ǀ ǂ ǃ ǁ/, and nine effluxes (only five on the alveolar), as well as a borrowed voiced alveolar click, /ǃᶢ/. Khwe is the only language to have a pre-nasalized voiced click.

{| class="wikitable" style="text-align:center"

|+Khwe clicks

!Dental

!Alveolar

!Palatal

!Lateral

!Voiceless

!Glottalized

!Voiced

!Aspirated

!Nasal

!Voiced nasal

!Uvular stop

!Fricative

!Affricate ejective

Tones

There are three tones in Khwe: high /V́/, mid /V̄/, low /V̀/. Long vowels and diphthongs have eight tones (missing only *mid–low as a combination).

Orthography

In 1957, Oswin Köhler, founder of the Institut für Afrikanistik at the University of Cologne, designed an orthography of Khwe in which he published three volumes of texts and grammatical sketches, based on observations of language and culture made over 30 years of visits to Namibia. As Köhler's orthography was designed for academic purposes, his volumes were published in German and French, and therefore inaccessible to the Khwe themselves. Köhler never made an attempt to teach literacy to members of the community.

Attempts to teach the Khwe orthography to first language speakers were not made until 1996, by scholars of the institute who took up Köhler's work. At the request and with the consultation of the Khwe, the orthography was revised and simplified by Matthias Brenzinger and Mathias Schladt between 1996 and 1997.

A collection of Khwe folktales was published in 1999 by Christa Kilian-Hatz and David Naude, using the revised orthography along with interlinear and free translations. Kilian-Hatz also published a dictionary of Khwe, although this is written in the linguistic orthography which uses symbols from the International Phonetic Alphabet in place of the Latin script use for the applied orthography.

The revised orthography has not been granted official status in Namibia. The Khwe language is not taught as a subject or used as a language of instruction in formal education, and few literacy materials exist. Nouns are marked with person-gender-number suffixes (PGNs). Gender division in Khwe is based on sex, and is expressed by PGNs, with gender being marked even in first-person dual and plural.

Negation in Khwe is indicated with the clause-final negative particle vé, which can be used to indicate non-occurrence of an event, non-equation between entities, and the non-possession of an entity.

Khwe lacks a separate class of adjectives. Pronouns, nouns and verbs, especially state verbs, can be used attributively. Khwe has a modifier-head order,

Khwe has two multiverbal constructions that may denote a series of closely connected events: serial verb constructions (SVC) and converb constructions. Khwe's most widely applied verb of perception is ǁám̀, 'taste, smell, touch'.

Khwe has a large number of loan words from Afrikaans.