The Phonological System of TumɁi (original) (raw)
Related papers
Tumʔi: A Phonetic & Phonological Analysis of a Khoisan Variety
University of Calgary, 2020
As part of a linguistic research team, I recorded a Khoisan language currently spoken by a linguistic community of three in the northern cape of South Africa. As the location in which this language was discovered is situated geographically close to varieties of both the Khoekhoe and Tuu language families, the question of genetic affiliation and typological similarity within the Khoisan lineages becomes significant. This will be addressed through the analysis of phonetic, phonological, and lexical similarities and oppositions between Tumʔi and representative Tuu and Khoekhoe languages (Beach 1938; Bleek 1930; Ladefoged & Traill 1994; Miller et al. 2007). Overall this project attempts to answer the question, how unique is this undocumented moribund variety Tumʔi in comparison to varieties of geographically neighboring Khoisan languages? The analysis comprises a detailed description of the vowel and consonant systems, as well as evidence of any contrastive phonetic and phonological features. The clear focus on the analysis of sound contrasts is a consequence of limited data due to speaker competence (Grinevald, 2007). As a result of incomplete acquisition and generational linguistic attrition, hence the recorded utterances constitute Khoisan content words produced within an Afrikaans framework (Killian 2009). Specific research questions include: • What is the sound inventory of this language? • Are there phonation or glottalization contrasts between vowels? • What click types and accompaniments make up the inventory? • Are there laryngeal contrasts between consonants? Results of the analyses indicate the following; Tumʔi shows traces of a phonation contrast, uvular click accompaniment, and evidence of laryngeally marked stops. The phonological typology shares more similarities with the Southern Khoisan varieties of the Tuu family than with varieties of the central Khoekhoe family. Direct implications for this project include a contribution to the current areal typological isoglosses separating the varieties of Khoisan located in southern Africa (Güldemann 2006). The final contribution of this work is the documentation of a moribund Khoisan dialect that has undergone no prior linguistic or anthropological investigation.
The Khoisan Languages of Southern Africa: Facts, Theories and Confusions
Critical Arts, 2019
The paper offers a brief but hopefully clarificatory account of the three language families generally referred to by linguists as Southern African Khoisan, and outlines ongoing and unresolved linguistic debates concerning relationships between the three families. The need is emphasised for linguists to move away from pre-theoretical assumptions based on the colonial construct of “race”, and—in the context of investigating diachronic language change—to include consideration rather of the social status of different speaker communities in relation to one another.
Contemporary Khoesan Languages of South Africa
Critical Arts: South-North Cultural and Media Studies, 2019
The purpose of this paper is to discuss contemporary Khoesan languages in South Africa from a sociolinguistic perspective. In order to do so, a basic explanation of Khoesan language families and their history is provided. From this socio-historical and linguistic context, contemporary Khoesan languages are examined in relation to: orthography and literacy practices; theory of language endangerment, documentation, maintenance and preservation; community collaboration and motivation; as well as outside support and feedback. Based on this information, the following recommendations for language maintenance and preservation of Khoesan languages in South Africa are made: 1) a comprehensive language revitalisation assessment report is needed for each contemporary Khoesan language; 2) early childhood education for mother tongue speakers is required; 3) international collaboration with Namibia to share existing literacy materials at all levels to facilitate mother tongue education; 4) invitations to be extended to international specialists encouraging cooperation with African based scholars, to improve theoretical understanding and application in an African context; 5) digitisation of and open access to existing resources to be made available online; and 6) an update of the national curriculum is needed to accurately represent contemporary Khoe and San people.
Dimensions of variability in Northern Khoekhoe language and culture
Ecol Soc, 2008
This article takes an interdisciplinary route towards explaining the complex history of Hai‖om culture and language. We begin this article with a short review of ideas relating to 'origins' and historical reconstructions as they are currently played out among Khoekhoe groups in Namibia, in particular with regard to the Hai‖om. We then take a comparative look at parts of the kinship system and the tonology of ǂĀkhoe Hai‖om and other variants of Khoekhoe. With regard to the kinship and naming system, we see patterns that show similarities with Nama and Damara on the one hand but also with 'San' groups on the other hand. With regard to tonology, new data from three northern Khoekoe varieties shows similarities as well as differences with Standard Namibian Khoekhoe and Ju and Tuu varieties. The historical scenarios that might explain these facts suggest different centres of innovations and opposite directions of diffusion. The anthropological and linguistic data demonstrates that only a fine-grained and multi-layered approach that goes far beyond any simplistic dichotomies can do justice to the Hai‖om riddle.
Indigenization in a downgraded continuum: Ideologies behind phonetic variation in Namibian Afrikaans
The International Journal of the Sociology of Language, 2021
This study generally looks at indigenization in languages historically introduced and promoted by colonial regimes. The case study that it presents involves Namibia, a Subsaharan African country formerly administered by South Africa, where Afrikaans was the dominant official language before being replaced by English upon independence. Afrikaans in Namibia still functions as an informal urban lingua franca while being spoken as a native language by substantial White and Coloured minorities. To what extent does the downranking of Afrikaans in Namibia co-occur with divergence from standard models historically located in South Africa? To answer this question, the study identifies variation patterns in Namibian Afrikaans phonetic data elicited from ethnically diverse young urban informants and links these patterns with perceptions and language ideologies. The phonetic data reveal divergence between Whites and Non-Whites and some convergence among Black L2 Afrikaansspeakers with Coloured varieties, while suggesting that a distinctive Black variety is emerging. The observed trends generally reflect perceived ethnoracial distinctions and segregation. They must be read against the background of shifting inter-group power relations and sociolinguistic prestige norms in independent Namibia, as well as of emergent ethnically inclusive Black urban identities.
A Bibliography of South African Languages, 2008-2017
2018
The production of this book has been generously sponsored by the Stichting Bibliographie Linguistique, Leiden. This is an open access title distributed under the terms of the prevailing CC-BY-NC-ND License at the time of publication, which permits any non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided no alterations are made and the original author(s) and source are credited. Cover illustration: the name of the Constitutional Court building (Johannesburg) written in eleven official languages of South Africa.
Kora: A lost Khoisan language of the early Cape and the Gariep
2018
The Kora book is essentially a standard work of the kind that linguists term a ‘reference grammar’. It includes a formal account of the phonetics and phonology of this once widely spoken but now almost extinct Khoekhoe language, and an analytical description of its morphology and syntactic structures. As is generally considered appropriate for works of this kind, the approach is theoretically neutral – in the sense that specific linguistic models are avoided, and the description is conservatively couched in the terminology of general linguistic description. (Linguistic works of this kind may lack glamour and fashionability – but they generally outlast framework-specific accounts!) The book goes further than this, however, and is ultimately something of a ‘compendium’. There was from the outset a degree of social accountability, since the very idea for the project had its origins in the context of the current social movement known as the Khoisan revival, and in the course of meetings with various people from the Griqua and Korana communities of the Free State. This personal connection with individuals keenly driven to reclaim their cultural heritage made it important to me that the book should be written in a relatively accessible manner, and that it should include far more than a straightforward grammatical description. The intention was to deliver as far as possible a complete resource in one volume. This is why the book also includes: • A collection of more than 40 texts in the original language, with parallel translations • A consolidated two-way dictionary The texts and vocabularies were drawn from older sources – which is to say, earlier works now out of print and not readily obtainable, which were sometimes originally published only with German translations. (The corpus of texts also served as a source of data for purposes of the linguistic analysis.) The dictionary is there to assist readers wishing to work through the texts in the original heritage language, but also includes vocabulary of cultural interest, such as names for stars, or musical instruments, traditional garments, and the names of the months in the old lunar calendar. The print edition is published under an Open Access agreement, and there are no royalties involved. Lastly, the co-publisher, South African History Online has generously made it possible to deliver an entirely free, downloadable version of the book. In the online edition, illustrative sound files have been linked to the examples in the chapter on the sounds of the language, and also to many of the entries in the dictionary. These sound files were obtained in the course of a rescue documentation carried out during the last few months of 2011, working with two last speakers of the language. The version made available here is the final proof copy. I have recently revisited the text in preparation for its translation into Afrikaans. In the course of checking the manuscript, have found a few accidental omissions and errors, which will be corrected in the Afrikaans edition. The omissions include acknowledgements to: Melanie Geustyn and Laddy McKechnie (National Library of South Africa) for providing digitised images of pages from the Collectanea Etymologica of Gottfried Leibniz; and librarians from the Africana section, Special Collections, Stellenbosch University Libraries, who kindly and swiftly provided several high resolution images needed at the last minute from works by Lichtenstein, Burchell and Campbell.
African languages and phonological theory
I've been asked to write about the mutual influence of African languages and phonological theory, specifically addressing two questions: What and how have African language contributed to phonological theory? What and how have linguistic theories contributed to the understanding African phonology? To treat these questions properly would be a major undertaking, first, because of the large number of African languages, and, second, because of their considerable diversity. To cite Greenberg's (1963) influentual classification, the roughly 2000 languages of Africa fall into four major linguistic phyla: Niger-Congo, Afro-Asiatic, Nilo-Saharan, and Khoisan (see Heine & Nurse 2000 for a more recent overview of African languages and their classification). Except for the click consonants of the last family (which spill over into some neighboring Bantu languages that have "borrowed" them), the phonological phenomena found in African languages are duplicated elsewhere on the gl...
2019
An expatriate (heritage) language can differ along many linguistic dimensions compared to contemporary geographic varieties of the same language spoken in the community’s country of origin. Such differences can help answer questions about language change and the linguistic traits used by the original settlers. In this study, we explore one difference between Afrikaans as spoken by a 120year-old expatriate community in Patagonia, and socalled “standard” South-African Afrikaans. We focus on velar palatalization, a feature with known geographical variation in contemporary SouthAfrican Afrikaans. Through a dynamic analysis of F1 and F2 trajectories, we demonstrate that Patagonian Afrikaans, but not “standard” South-African Afrikaans, uses a palatal glide between /k/ and following non-back high and mid vowels. We interpret these results within our broader research aim of discerning the variety of Afrikaans that was spoken by the original Patagonian settlers.