ǀXam
| ǀXam | ||
|---|---|---|
|
Spoken in |
South Africa , Lesotho | |
| speaker | 0 (extinct) | |
| Linguistic classification |
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| Official status | ||
| Official language in | - | |
| Language codes | ||
| ISO 639 -1 |
- |
|
| ISO 639 -2 |
xam |
|
| ISO 639-3 | ||
ǀXam , or ǀXam Kaǃkʼe , is a Khoisan language that became extinct in the 20th century and was spoken in South Africa in an area south of the central reaches of the Orange River . It belongs to the Tuu language family . It is closely related to Nǁng , which still has a few speakers.
ǀXam is the language of the slogan of the Republic of South Africa adopted on April 27, 2000 :
- ǃke e: ǀxarra ǁke
(“Different people unite”, mostly reproduced in forms with collective reference such as “Different peoples united”). It is not known whether this could actually have been a saying in ǀXam . As an extinct language, ǀXam is not one of the eleven official languages of South Africa. In the coat of arms of South Africa the motto can be read in the spelling “ ! Ke e: / xarra // ke ”, that is, with the spelling of the clicks that can be quoted in ASCII .
A significant amount of the scientific work on ǀXam was done by Wilhelm Bleek , a 19th century German linguist .
literature
- A. Traill: The Khoesan languages. In: Rajend Mesthrie (University of Cape Town; ed.): Language in South Africa , Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 2002, ISBN 0-521-79105-7 , pp. 36-40
Web links
- The Digital Bleek and Lloyd collection. University of Cape Town , CCA (Center for Curating the Archive), accessed on August 24, 2013 (complete scans of Wilhelm Bleek's handwritten workbooks with texts in ǀXam).
Individual evidence
- ↑ a b The national Coat of Arms - construction and meaning. (PDF; 231 kB) Republic of South Africa (Department: Government Communication and Information System), 2005, p. 3 , accessed on August 24, 2013 (English).
- ↑ The ǀXam people and their language. In: South African Government Information. November 28, 2007, archived from the original on November 16, 2012 ; accessed on August 23, 2013 .
- ↑ New coat of arms of the Republic of South Africa. www.flaggenkunde.de, accessed on August 24, 2013 (source given there: “RSA 2000 No. 05/00, publisher: South African Embassy Berlin”).