A Year in Language, Day 127: Sandawe Sandawe is spoken by some 60,000 people in Tanzania. It is currently classified as a language isolate, though there are proposed links to the Khoe languages of Botswana. You may see it and other languages referred to as "Khoisan" This now defunct language family used to contain most of the "click languages" of sub-Saharan Africa, all proposed to be related to one another by virtue of geography and the presence of distinctive click consonants, but under scrutiny this is not really enough to prove an actual relationship. Even before accounting for clicks Sandawe has a sizable consonant inventory. Its stop consonants come in voiced, voiceless, aspirated, and ejective flavors, and it has a full lateral pattern of consonants, by which I mean dental consonants with lateral airflow. Lateral airflow is when air travels not over the tongue, but along the sides of it. English has one lateral consonant: "L" which is a type of consonant called an approximant (/j/, /w/, and /r/ are all this type as well). Sandawe also has a lateral fricative, and affricatives in all the aforementioned flavors of the stop consonants. Sandawe has three classes of click consonants; the dental click, /Ç/, like the noise English speakers use for "tsk-tsk", the lateral click /Ç/, similar to the noise one makes when urging a horse on, and the alveolar click /!/ similar to the noise one makes to imitate a horse canter (or perhaps a pair of coconuts). These three clicks pattern just like the stops; they can be voiceless, voiced (albeit uncommonly), aspirated, or glottalized. Sandawe has a unique style of marking subject agreement. Like in most European languages the subject is marked in terms of person and number. European languages, and indeed most languages that mark this, do so on the verb. Sandawe does it on whatever part of speech comes first in the sentence, be it another noun, and adverb, or even a grammatical particle.
