Click consonants in contact: a comparative sociohistorical analysis with special reference to Nama-Afrikaans contact
- Authors: Christie, Camilla Rose
- Date: 2023-10-13
- Subjects: Click consonant , Language contact , Sociohistorical linguistics , Sociolinguistics , Nama language , Khoekhoe , African languages , Linguistic borrowing
- Language: English
- Type: Academic theses , Doctoral theses , text
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/432370 , vital:72865 , DOI 10.21504/10962/432370
- Description: Despite their ubiquity across southern Africa, click consonants are among the world’s most poorly understood speech sounds. Details of their phonological behaviour during language contact remain unclear, in large part because of the under-documentation of contact events of marginalised languages in rural contexts. Working within a sociohistorical linguistic framework with reference to material socioeconomic theories of language contact, this thesis compares and contrasts the diachronic phonological outcomes of various click loan events. The primary event under investigation is the donation of loanwords from an endangered click language, Nama, via substrate interference with the lexicon of a socially dominant clickless language, Afrikaans, in the Namaqualand region of the Northern Cape. The phonological adaptations employed to integrate donated lexical material into a host grammar ought ordinarily to be fairly regular, but the cross-linguistic rarity of click consonants complicates this process. The twenty click consonants expected of Nama undergo phonemic neutralisation when realised in Namaqualand Afrikaans, such that contrast embedded in click ‘type’ and click ‘accompaniment’ is collapsed. Speakers of Namaqualand Afrikaans employ any click type when uttering any click word, and may even use different click types in different tokens of the same lexical item. This unpredictability neutralises contrast. Nonetheless, there is some evidence of a diachronic trend from the unpredictable use of multiple click types and accompaniments toward the stable use of only the linguopulmonic dental click. When these novel data are set against the phonological outcomes of other contact events between a click language and a clickless languages across southern Africa, the normal outcome of click loan under is shown to be the collapse of ‘type’ contrasts. An important outlier is the large ‘type’-contrasting click inventory still shared by isiXhosa and isiZulu long after the extinction of donor click languages in the Khoekhoe branch, suggesting that this contact event must historically have entailed sustained community-wide bilingualism. These comparative observations are used to develop a cross-linguistic typology of click loan events that aims to improve our understanding of the precolonial linguistic landscape of southern Africa. The improved documentation of click consonants in rural language varieties is urgently recommended. , Thesis (PhD) -- Faculty of Humanities, Linguistics and Applied Language Studies, 2023
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- Date Issued: 2023-10-13
Khoekhoe lexical borrowing in Namaqualand Afrikaans
- Authors: Christie, Camilla Rose
- Date: 2020
- Subjects: Code switching (Linguistics) , Afrikaans language -- Foreign elements -- Nama , Nama language -- Foreign elements -- Afrikaans , Afrikaans language -- Phonology , Nama language -- Phonology
- Language: English
- Type: Thesis , Masters , MA
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/168385 , vital:41576
- Description: Although several languages in the Khoekhoe branch were historically spoken alongside Afrikaans in bilingual speech communities throughout the Western and Northern Cape, the last century has seen abrupt and catastrophic language loss, resulting in a shift from a bilingual to a monolingual paradigm. However, a number of ethnobotanical surveys conducted in the Namaqualand region of the Northern Cape over the last forty years have recorded the retention of Khoekhoe-branch plant names by monolingual Afrikaans speakers. Such surveys make no attempt to source these loanwords to their Khoekhoe-branch targets, do not make use of the standardised Namibian Khoekhoe orthography, and often resort to transcribing loaned click consonants using only ‘t’. This study undertakes a sociohistorical linguistic investigation into the etymological origins and contemporary usage of these loaned plant names in order to develop a clearer understanding of language contact and lexical borrowing in the Namaqualand region. Following the lexicographical compilation of a representative corpus of loanwords, this study conducts a series of semi-structured interviews with monolingual speakers of Namaqualand Afrikaans. Qualitative sociolinguistic analysis of these interviews reveals that, although loanwords are perceived to be of Nama origin, they are semantically opaque beyond pragmatic reference. Preliminary phonological observations identify a loss of phonemic contrastivity in loaned clicks coupled with a high incidence of variability, and suggest epenthetic stop insertion and epenthetic nasalisation as two possible strategies facilitating click loan. Synthesising these ob servations, this study speculates that the use of loanwords hosting clicks may enjoy a degree of covert prestige in Namaqualand Afrikaans, which may in turn shed light on historical sociolinguistic processes of click diffusion. It recommends that urgent and immediate attention be focused on the usage, sociolinguistic status, and regional variation of Nama within the Northern Cape, and advocates strongly for cooperation and improved communication between linguists and ethnobotanists.
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- Date Issued: 2020