The sociohistory of clicks in Southern Bantu

Abstract

INTRODUCTION: CLICKS IN SOUTHERN AFRICA The click consonants of southern Africa are such pervasive elements within the indigenous Khoesan languages and so striking to the ear that the earliest explorers and missionaries to this area frequently commented on the very distinct acoustic quality of local languages. Such commentary was most often negative: Among the Hottentot dialects, none is so rough and wild, and differs so much from the rest, as that of the Bosjesmans, so that it is scarcely understood by any of the other tribes. It is, in the first place, much poorer in sounds: many sounds, which may be expressed by our letters … are either totally wanting among them, or occur rarely. Pure vowels are seldom to be heard; but the cluck and the diphthongs are much more frequent. The cluck, in particular, seems the most completely at home among them: scarcely a word occurs without it. (H. Lichtenstien, cited in Theal 1910: 19–20) The peoples and languages of southern Africa soon attracted the attention of linguistic and cultural evolutionary theorists, who saw southern African hunters and their languages as representing ‘primitive types’. The view, first expressed by van Ginneken (1911: 346–7), that clicks were the phonetic material from which human language first arose was developed and ardently championed by the Polish linguist Roman Stopa (1935, 1979). Clicks were seen as arising from ‘the condensed expression of the gesticulatory part of speech’ (Stopa 1979: 28).

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