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The Khoisan languages (/ ˈ k ɔɪ s ɑː n / KOY-sahn; also Khoesan or Khoesaan) are a number of African languages once classified together, originally by Joseph Greenberg. [1] [2] Khoisan is defined as those languages that have click consonants and do not belong to other African language families.
Some Khoisan languages are typologically unusual in allowing mixed voicing in non-click consonant clusters/contours, such as ̬d̥sʼk͡x, so it is not surprising that they would allow mixed voicing in clicks as well. This may be an effect of epiglottalised voiced consonants, because voicing is incompatible with epiglottalisation.
ǃKung constituted one of the branches of the putative Khoisan language family, and was called Northern Khoisan in that scenario, but the unity of Khoisan has never been demonstrated and is now regarded as spurious. Nonetheless, the anthropological term "Khoisan" has been retained as an umbrella term for click languages in general.
They postulate that the ancestral bilabial clicks became dental in ǃKung. However, Starostin (2003) [2] argues that the bilabial clicks are a secondary development in ǂʼAmkoe. He cites the ǂʼAmkoe words for 'one' and 'two', /ŋ͡ʘũ/ and /ʘoa/, where no other Khoisan language has a labial consonant of any kind in its words for these ...
There are five Khoisan families that have not been shown to be related to each other: Khoe, Tuu and Kx'a, which are found mainly in Namibia and Botswana, as well as Sandawe and Hadza of Tanzania, which are language isolates. A striking feature of Khoisan languages, and the reason they are often grouped together, is their use of click consonants.
All click types (alveolar ǃ, dental ǀ, lateral ǁ, palatal ǂ, retroflex ‼, and labial ʘ) have glottalized variants. They are very common: All of the Khoisan languages of Africa have them (the Khoe, Tuu, and Kx'a language families, Sandawe, and Hadza), as does Dahalo and the Bantu languages Yeyi and Xhosa (though Zulu does not). [1]
The compound term Khoisan / Khoesān is a modern anthropological convention in use since the early-to-mid 20th century. Khoisan is a coinage by Leonhard Schulze in the 1920s and popularised by Isaac Schapera. [6] It entered wider usage from the 1960s based on the proposal of a "Khoisan" language family by Joseph Greenberg.
The Khoi languages were the first Khoisan languages known to European colonists and are famous for their clicks, though these are not as extensive as in other Khoisan language families. There are two primary branches of the family, Khoikhoi of Namibia and South Africa , and Tshu–Khwe of Botswana and Zimbabwe .