#khoekhoe

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Khoekhoe language

The Khoekhoe language, also known by the ethnic terms Nama or Damara and formerly as Hottento, is the most widespread of the non-Bantu languages of Southern Africa that make heavy use of click consonants and therefore were formerly classified as a Khoisan language. It belongs to the Khoe language family, and is spoken in Namibia, Botswana, and South Africa primarily by three ethnic groups, Nukhoen, Namakhoen, and Haillomkhoen.

Khoekhoe is a national language in Namibia, where it is used for teaching up to the university level as well as in the public administration.

Population: about 200,000

Khoekhoe (Khoekhoegowab)

Basic facts

Number of native speakers: 280,000

Official language: Namibia

Language of diaspora: Botswana, South Africa

Script: Latin, 36 letters

Grammatical cases: 0

Linguistic typology: agglutinative, SOV

Language family: Khoe, Khoekhoe

Number of dialects: 3 main groups

History

1659 - first study of the language

Writing system and pronunciation

These are the letters that make up the alphabet: a b d e f g gy h i j k kh l m n o p r s t ts u v w z ǀ ǀg ǀkh ǀh ǃ ǃg ǃkh ǃh ǃn ǂ ǂg ǂkh ǂh ǂn ǁ ǁg ǁkh ǁh ǁn.

Khoekhoe is one of the few non-Bantu languages that uses click consonants. Each click consists of one of four primary articulations or influxes and one of five secondary articulations or effluxes, just like non-click consonants.

There are three tones: high, marked with an acute accent; mid, not marked, and low, marked with a grave accent. 

Grammar

Nouns have three classes, three numbers (singular, dual, and plural), and no cases. Pronominal enclitics are used to mark person, gender, and number (PGN) on noun phrases and can be divided into nominative, object, and oblique paradigms.

There are four definite articles, which can also be combined with PGN markers and which express whether the speaker, the addressee or both are concerned.

Verbs are conjugated for tense and aspect (punctual, imperfective, and perfective). Other clitics can be added to express reciprocity, reflexiveness, and passiveness.

Dialects

There are three main dialect groups: Nama-Damara, Haiǁom, and ǂĀkhoe. Nama-Damara includes Bondelswarts-Nama, Sesfontein Dama, Namidama, Central Dama, Central Nama, and Topnaar-Nama.

An interesting article about the social process of creating machine translation datasets in Khoekhoegowab. Excerpt: 

On the surface, Wilhelmina Ndapewa Onyothi Nekoto and Elfriede Gowases seem like a mismatched pair. Nekoto is a 26-year-old data scientist. Gowases is a retired English teacher in her late 60s. Nekoto, who used to play rugby in Namibia’s national league, stands about a head taller than Gowases, who is short and slight. Like nearly half of Namibians, Nekoto speaks Oshiwambo, while Gowases is one of the country’s roughly 200,000 native speakers of Khoekhoegowab.

But the women grew close over a series of working visits starting last October. At Gowases’s home, they translated sentences from Khoekhoegowab to English. Each sentence pair became another entry in a budding database of translations, which Nekoto hopes will one day power AI tools that can automatically translate between Namibia’s languages, bolstering communication and commerce within the country.

“If we can design applications that are able to translate what we’re saying in real time,” Nekoto says, “then that’s one step closer toward economic [development].” That’s one of the goals of the Masakhane project, which organizes natural language processing researchers like Nekoto to work on low-resource African languages.

Compiling a dataset to train an AI model is often a dry, technical task. But Nekoto’s self-driven project, rooted in hours of close conversation with Gowases, is anything but. Each datapoint contains fragments of cultural knowledge preserved in the stories, songs, and recipes that Gowases has translated. This information is as crucial for the success of a machine translation algorithm as the grammar and syntax embedded in the training data.