Kwadi language

Kwadi
!Kwa/tse
Native to Angola
Extinct 2007[1]
Language codes
ISO 639-3 kwz
Glottolog kwad1244[2]

Kwadi /ˈkwɑːdi/ was a "click language" and is an extinct language of uncertain classification once spoken in the southwest corner of Angola. It is believed to be extinct. There were only fifty Kwadi in the 1950s, of whom only 4–5 were competent speakers of the language. Three partial speakers were known in 1965, but in 1981 no speakers could be found.

Because Kwadi is poorly recorded, there is not much evidence with which to classify it. It is sometimes classified as the most known divergent member of the Khoe family, linking it to the Khoe languages in a "Kwadi–Khoe" family, though this conclusion is disputed. Proponents say it appears to have preserved elements of proto-Khoe that were lost in the western Khoe languages under the influence of Juu languages in Botswana.[3]

The Kwadi people, called Kwepe (also spelled Cuepe) by the Bantu, appear to have been a remnant population of southwestern African hunter-gatherers, otherwise only represented by the Cimba, Kwisi and the Damara, who adopted the Khoekhoe language. Like the Kwisi they were fishermen, on the lower reaches of the Coroca River.[4]

Kwadi was alternatively known by the varieties of Koroka (Ba-koroka, Curoca, Ma-koroko, Mu-coroca) and Cuanhoca.

Dialect

  • Zorotua (Va-sorontu)[5]

See also

References

  1. ↑ "UNESCO Atlas of the World's Languages in danger". www.unesco.org. Retrieved 2018-05-25.
  2. ↑ Hammarström, Harald; Forkel, Robert; Haspelmath, Martin, eds. (2017). "Kwadi". Glottolog 3.0. Jena, Germany: Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History.
  3. ↑ Changing profile when encroaching on hunter-gatherer territory?: towards a history of the Khoe–Kwadi family in southern Africa. Tom Güldemann, paper presented at the conference on Historical linguistics and hunter-gatherer populations in global perspective, at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Aug. 2006.
  4. ↑ Blench, Roger. 1999. "Are the African Pygmies an Ethnographic Fiction?". Pp 41–60 in Biesbrouck, Elders, & Rossel (eds.) Challenging Elusiveness: Central African Hunter-Gatherers in a Multidisciplinary Perspective. Leiden."Archived copy" (PDF). Archived from the original (PDF) on 2012-01-26. Retrieved 2011-10-26.
  5. ↑ Hammarström, Harald; Forkel, Robert; Haspelmath, Martin, eds. (2017). "Zorotua". Glottolog 3.0. Jena, Germany: Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History.
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