Nama language

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Nama language

The Khoekhoe language, or Khoekhoegowab, also known by the ethnic term Nàmá and previously the now discouraged term Hottentot
Khoikhoi

The Khoikhoi or Khoi, in standardised Khoekhoe/Nama language orthography spelled Khoekhoe, are a historical division of the Khoisan ethnic group, who were the native Black Africans of southwestern Africa, closely related to the Bushmen ....
, is the most populous and widespread of the Khoisan languages

Khoisan languages

The Khoisan languages are the click languages of Africa which do not belong to other language families. They include languages indigenous to southern and eastern Africa, though some such, as the Khoi languages, appear to have moved to their current locations not long before the Bantu expansion....
. It belongs to the Khoe language family, and is spoken in Namibia

Namibia

Namibia, officially the Republic of Namibia, is a country in southern Africa on the Atlantic Ocean coast. It shares borders with Angola and Zambia to the north, Botswana to the east, and South Africa to the south....
, Botswana

Botswana

The Republic of Botswana , is a landlocked country in Southern Africa. Citizens of Botswana are called "Batswana" , regardless of ethnicity. Formerly a British protectorate of Bechuanaland Protectorate, Botswana adopted its new name after becoming independent within the Commonwealth of Nations on 30 September 1966....
, and South Africa

South Africa

The Republic of South Africa, also known by Official names of South Africa, is a country located at the southern tip of the continent of Africa....
by three ethnic groups, the Nama

Namaqua

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Encyclopedia

Khoisan languages

Namibia

Botswana

South Africa

The Republic of South Africa, also known by Official names of South Africa, is a country located at the southern tip of the continent of Africa....
by three ethnic groups, the Nama

Namaqua

Nama are an African ethnic group of South Africa, Namibia and Botswana. They speak the Nama language of the Khoe-Kwadi language family. The Nama are the largest group of the Khoikhoi people, most of whom have largely disappeared as a group, except for the Namas....
, Damara, and . It appears that the Damara picked up the language from the Nama in Botswana, and that they migrated to Namibia separately. The name for Nama speakers, Khoekhoen
Khoikhoi

The Khoikhoi or Khoi, in standardised Khoekhoe/Nama language orthography spelled Khoekhoe, are a historical division of the Khoisan ethnic group, who were the native Black Africans of southwestern Africa, closely related to the Bushmen ....
, is from the Nama word khoe "person", with reduplication

Reduplication

Reduplication, in linguistics, is a morphology process by which the root or Stem of a word, or part of it, is repeated.Reduplication is used in inflections to convey a grammatical function, such as plurality, intensification, etc., and in lexical Derivation to create new words....
and the suffix -n to indicate the plural. According to Ethnologue

Ethnologue

Ethnologue: Languages of the World is a web and print publication of SIL International , a Christianity linguistics service organization, which studies lesser-known languages, primarily to provide the speakers with Bibles, in their native language....
, there were 250,000 speakers in the 1990s.

Nama is a national language

National language

A national language is a language which has some connection - de facto or de jure - with a people and perhaps by extension the territory they occupy....
in Namibia. In Namibia and South Africa, radio

Radio

Radio is the transmission of signals, by modulation of electromagnetic radiation with frequency below those of visible light.Electromagnetic radiation radio propagation by means of oscillating electromagnetic fields that pass through the air and the vacuum of space....
programs are broadcast in Nama.

Classification

Nama is a Khoe language

Khoe languages

The Khoe languages are the largest of the non-Bantu languages language family indigenous to southern Africa. They are often considered to be a branch of a suspected Khoisan languages language family, and are known as Central Khoisan in that scenario....
, which is part of a hypothetical Khoisan

Khoisan languages

The Khoisan languages are the click languages of Africa which do not belong to other language families. They include languages indigenous to southern and eastern Africa, though some such, as the Khoi languages, appear to have moved to their current locations not long before the Bantu expansion....
phylum, it belongs to the northern branch of the Khoekhoe subbranch of the family (together with now extinct Eini).

Geographic distribution

Nama has 250,000 speakers in Namibia

Namibia

South Africa

The Republic of South Africa, also known by Official names of South Africa, is a country located at the southern tip of the continent of Africa....
, and (a few in) Botswana

Botswana

Dialects

?Akhoe
Damara

Sesfontein Damara
Sesfontein Damara

The Sesfontein Damara is a group of the #Nukhoe people residing around !Nani/aus in northwestern Namibia. They are a subtribe of the Damara nation called Namidaman....
Namidama
Central Damara

Nama

Gimsbok Nama

Hai?om

Phonology

Vowels

There are 5 vowel qualities, found as oral and nasal

Nasal vowel

A nasal vowel is a vowel that is produced with a lowering of the Soft palate so that air escapes both through nose as well as the mouth. The term stands in opposition to the term "oral vowel" refers to an ordinary vowel without this nasalisation....
. These may be long or short, and there are several sequences or diphthong

Diphthong

In phonetics, a diphthong, or , is a contour vowel?that is, a unitary vowel that changes vowel quality during its pronunciation, or "glides", with a glissando of the tongue from one articulation to another, as in the English words eye, boy, and cow. This contrasts with "pure" vowels, or monophthongs, where the tongue is held s...
s: oral and nasal . ( is phonemically

Phoneme

In human language, a phoneme is the smallest posited linguistically distinctive unit of sound. Phonemes carry no semantic content themselves. In theoretical terms, phonemes are not the physical segment s themselves, but cognitive abstractions or categorizations of them....
.)

Tones

Nama has three tone

Tone (linguistics)

Tone is the use of pitch in language to distinguish lexical or grammatical meaning?that is, to distinguish or inflection words. All languages use pitch to express emotional and other paralinguistic information, and to convey emphasis, contrast, and other such features in what is called intonation , but not all languages use tones to distingu...
s, , which may occur on vowels and nasal stops. The mid tone is not written.

Consonants

Nama has 31 consonants: 20 clicks and a simple set of 11 non-clicks.

Non-clicks

	Bilabial Bilabial consonant In phonetics, a bilabial consonant is a consonant articulated with both lips. The bilabial consonants identified by the International Phonetic Alphabet are:...	Alveolar Alveolar consonant Alveolar consonants are articulated with the tongue against or close to the superior alveolar ridge, which is called that because it contains the Dental alveolus of the superior teeth....	Velar Velar consonant Velars are consonants articulated with the back part of the tongue against the soft palate, the back part of the roof of the mouth, known also as the Soft palate)....	Glottal Glottal consonant Glottal consonants are consonants articulated with the glottis. Many phoneticians consider them, or at least the so-called fricatives, to be transitional states of the glottis without a point of articulation as other consonants have; in fact, some do not consider them to be consonants at all....
Nasal Nasal consonant A nasal consonant is produced with a lowered soft palate in the mouth, allowing air to escape freely through the nose. The oral cavity still acts as a resonance chamber for the sound, but the air does not escape through the mouth as it is blocked by the tongue....
Plosive
Fricative Fricative consonant Fricatives are consonants produced by forcing air through a narrow channel made by placing two Place of articulation close together. These may be the lower lip against the upper teeth, in the case of ; the back of the tongue against the soft palate, in the case of German language , the final consonant of Bach; or the side of the tongue ag...

Between vowels, is pronounced and is pronounced . In the orthography, p, t, k indicate that the following vowel carries a high tone, while b, d, g that it carries a low tone.

Clicks

The clicks

Click consonant

Clicks are speech sounds such as English tsk! tsk! used to express disapproval, or the tchick! used to spur on a horse. In many languages of southern Africa, and in three languages of East Africa, they are ordinary consonants, found for example in the name of the language Xhosa language....
are doubly articulated consonant

Doubly articulated consonant

Doubly articulated consonants are consonants with two simultaneous primary place of articulation of the same manner of articulation . They are a subset of co-articulated consonants....
s. Each click consists of one of four primary articulations or "influxes" and one of five secondary articulation or "effluxes". The combination of influxes and effluxes results in 20 phonemes.

The aspirated clicks are often pronounced as affricates. That is, may be pronounced anywhere from to .

The voiceless nasal accompaniment is difficult to hear when not between vowels, so to foreign ears it may sound like a longer but less raspy version of the aspirated accompaniment.

There have been several orthographies used for Nama, with sometimes conflicting differences in the representation of the clicks. In A Khoekhoegowab dictionary (Haacke 2000) the standardized version of Nama orthography has been used.

accompaniment	affricated clicks		'sharp' clicks		standardized orthography (with )
accompaniment	dental clicks Dental click The dental clicks are a family of click consonants found, as constituents of words, only in Africa and in the Damin ritual jargon of Australia....	lateral clicks	alveolar clicks Postalveolar click The alveolar or postalveolar clicks are a family of click consonants found only in Africa and in the Damin ritual jargon of Australia.The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents the forward articulation of these sounds is ....	palatal clicks Palatal click The palato-alveolar clicks are a family of click consonants found only in Africa. They are commonly called palatal clicks.The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents the forward articulation of these sounds is ....	standardized orthography (with )
Tenuis Tenuis consonant A tenuis consonant is a stop consonant or affricate consonant which is voiceless consonant, aspiration , and glottalic consonant. That is, it has a "plain" phonation like , with a voice onset time close to zero, as in Spanish p, t, ch, k, or English p, t, k after s, as in sp'y, st'y, sk'y....
Aspirated Aspiration (phonetics) In phonetics, aspiration is the strong burst of Earth's atmosphere that accompanies either the release or, in the case of preaspiration, the closure of some obstruents....
Nasal Nasal consonant A nasal consonant is produced with a lowered soft palate in the mouth, allowing air to escape freely through the nose. The oral cavity still acts as a resonance chamber for the sound, but the air does not escape through the mouth as it is blocked by the tongue....
Voiceless nasal with delayed aspiration
Tenuis with glottal stop

Grammar

Nama has a Subject Object Verb

Subject Object Verb

In linguistic typology, Subject Object Verb is the type of languages in which the subject , object , and verb of a sentence appear or usually appear in that order....
word order.

Sample text

English Translation

The lion is king of all the beasts because he is very strong, thick of chest, slim of waist, and runs fast.

Every morning, the young lion would go out into the forest and compare his strength with the other beasts. And every day he would return the victor. This news was heard and known throughout the animal world: that the lion was king of the beasts. Every day that he would return victorious, his mother would praise him, "Son of mine! Thick of neck! Slim of waist! Thick of chest! He-man!"

But one morning, when having got up the young lion was stretching, she praised him, "Thick of chest! Thick of neck! Lion-armed! Slim of waist!," finished praising him and said, "I truly believe that you are strongest of all the beasts. Every day you go out into the forest and return, and show me that you are truly king of the beasts. But, my son, one day you will go out into the forest. And while you are out walking around in the forest, you will see a little thing which walks straight, its head sitting on its shoulders. And, Son of mine! Thick of chest! Thick of neck! Slim of waist!, the day you meet that little thing, on that day the sun will set while you have not returned. The name of that little thing is called 'man'.

Bibliography

Beach, Douglas M. 1938. The phonetics of the Hottentot language. Cambridge: Heffer.

Haacke, Wilfrid. 1976. A Nama grammar: the noun-phrase. MA thesis. University of Cape Town.

Haacke, Wilfrid H. G. 1977. The so-called "personal pronoun" in Nama. In Traill, Anthony, ed., Khoisan linguistic studies 3, 43-62. Communications 6. Johannesburg: African Studies Institute, University of the Witwatersrand.

Haacke, Wilfrid. 1978. Subject deposition in Nama. MA thesis. University of Essex. Colchester (UK).

Haacke, Wilfrid. 1992. Compound noun phrases in Nama. In Derek F. Gowlett, ed., African linguistic contributions (Festschrift Ernst Westphal), 189-194. Pretoria: Via Afrika.

Haacke, Wilfrid. 1992. Dislocated noun phrases in Khoekhoe (Nama/Damara): further evidence for the sentential hypothesis. Afrikanistische Arbeitspapiere, 29, 149-162.

Haacke, Wilfrid. 1995. Instances of incorporation and compounding in Khoekhoegowab (Nama/Damara). In Anthony Traill, Rainer Vossen and Marguerite Anne Megan Biesele, eds., The complete linguist: papers in memory of Patrick J. Dickens, 339-361. Cologne: Rüdiger Köppe Verlag.

Haacke, Wilfrid, Eliphas Eiseb and Levi Namaseb. 1997. Internal and external relations of Khoekhoe dialects: a preliminary survey. In Wilfrid Haacke & Edward D. Elderkin, eds., Namibian languages: reports and papers, 125-209. Cologne: Rüdiger Köppe Verlag for the University of Namibia.

Haacke, Wilfrid. 1999. The tonology of Khoekhoe (Nama/Damara). Quellen zur Khoisan-Forschung/Research in Khoisan studies, Bd 16. Cologne: Rüdiger Köppe Verlag.

Haacke, Wilfrid H.G. & Eiseb, Eliphas (2002) A Khoekhoegowab dictionary with an English-Khoekhoegowab index. Windhoek : Gamsberg Macmillan. ISBN 99916-0-401-4

Hagman, Roy S. 1977. Nama Hottentot grammar. Language science monographs, v 15. Bloomington: Indiana University.

Hahn, Theophilus. 1870. Die Sprache der Nama, nebst einem Anhang enthaltend Sprachproben aus dem Munde des Volkes. Redigierte Ausgabe eine Dissertation mit einem Anhang über Mythen der Khoi-khoin nebst Übersetzung und Wörterverzeichnis. Leipzig: Johann Ambrosius Barth.

External links

(dead link as of January 2009; by Google)