Kwadi (language)
Kwadi [ kwɑːdi ] was a click language and is an extinct language of unclear classification that was once spoken in the southwest corner of Angola . It is believed to be extinct. In the 1950s there were only 50 kwadi, of whom only 4-5 were competent speakers of the language. Three speakers were known in 1965, but no speakers could be found as early as 1981.
Since Kwadi is poorly recorded, there isn't much evidence to classify it. It is sometimes classified as a member of the Khoe family that it is said to be associated with the Khoe languages in a "Kwadi-Khoe" family, although this conclusion is controversial. Proponents say it appears to have preserved elements of Proto-Khoe that were lost in the Western Khoe languages under the influence of the Juu languages in Botswana .
The Kwadi people, called by the Bantu Kwepe, appear to have descended from South West African hunters and gatherers, otherwise only represented by the Cimba, Kwisi and Damara , who adopted the Khoe language. Like the Kwisi, they were fishermen on the lower reaches of the Coroca River.
Individual evidence
- ^ Matthias Brenzinger: Language Diversity Endangered. Walter de Gruyter, 2007, page 188; limited preview in Google Book search.
- ↑ Tom Güldemann: Changing profile when encroaching on hunter-gatherer territory: towards a history of the Khoe-Kwadi family in southern Africa . Lecture at the workshop on languages of hunters and gatherers on the occasion of the conference Historical linguistics and hunter-gatherer populations in global perspective at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology , Leipzig, August 2006.
- ^ Roger Blench: Are the African Pygmies an Ethnographic Fiction ?. Pages 41–60 in Biesbrouck, Elders, & Rossel (eds.): Challenging Elusiveness: Central African Hunter-Gatherers in a Multidisciplinary Perspective . Leiden, 1999. Archived copy . Archived from the original on January 26, 2012. Retrieved October 26, 2011.