The Khoekhoe language /ˈkɔɪkɔɪ/, or Khoekhoegowab, also known by the ethnic term Nàmá and previously the now-discouraged term Hottentot, is the most widespread of those languages of southern Africa which contain many "click" sounds and have therefore been loosely classified as Khoisan languages. It belongs to the Khoe language family, and is spoken in Namibia, Botswana, and South Africa by three ethnic groups, the Nama, Damara, and Haiǁom.
It appears that the Damara picked up the language from the Nama in Botswana, and that they migrated to Namibia separately from the Nama. The Haiǁom, who had spoken a Juu language, later shifted to Khoekhoe. The name for Nama speakers, Khoekhoen, is from the Nama word khoe "person", with reduplication and the suffix -n to indicate the plural. Georg Friedrich Wreede was the first European to study the language, after arriving in Cape Town in 1659.
Khoekhoe is a national language in Namibia. In Namibia and South Africa, radio programs are broadcast in it. In Namibia, it is used for teaching up to the university level as well as in the administration.
Read more about Khoekhoe Language: Dialects and Varieties, Orthography, Grammar, Sample Text, Common Words and Phrases, Bibliography
Famous quotes containing the word language:
“This is of the loon—I do not mean its laugh, but its looning,—is a long-drawn call, as it were, sometimes singularly human to my ear,—hoo-hoo-ooooo, like the hallooing of a man on a very high key, having thrown his voice into his head. I have heard a sound exactly like it when breathing heavily through my own nostrils, half awake at ten at night, suggesting my affinity to the loon; as if its language were but a dialect of my own, after all.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)