Khoisan Languages
The Khoisan languages (also known as the Khoesan or Khoesaan languages) are the click languages of Africa which do not belong to other language families. They were once thought to have a genealogical relationship, but this is no longer generally accepted, and has become a minority position among linguists.
Khoisan languages include languages indigenous to southern and eastern Africa, though some, such as the Khoi languages, appear to have moved to their current locations not long before the Bantu expansion. In southern Africa, their speakers are the Khoi and Bushmen (Saan), in east Africa the Sandawe and Hadza.
Prior to the Bantu expansion, it is likely that Khoisan languages, or languages like them, were spread throughout southern and eastern Africa. They are currently restricted to the Kalahari Desert, primarily in Namibia and Botswana, and to the Rift Valley in central Tanzania.
Most of the languages are endangered, and several are moribund or extinct. Most have no written record. The only widespread Khoisan language is Khoekhoe ("Nàmá") of Namibia, with a quarter of a million speakers; Sandawe in Tanzania is second in number with about 40,000, some monolingual; and the Juu language cluster of the northern Kalahari is spoken by some 30,000 people.
Khoisan languages are best known for their use of click consonants as phonemes. These are typically written with letters such as ǃ and ǂ. The Juǀʼhoan language has some 30 click consonants, not counting clusters, among perhaps 90 phonemes, which include strident and pharyngealized vowels and four tones. The ǃXóõ and ǂHõã languages are similarly complex.
Grammatically, the southern Khoisan languages are generally fairly isolating, with word order being more widely used to indicate grammatical relations than is inflection. By contrast, the languages of Tanzania have large numbers of inflectional suffixes.
Read more about Khoisan Languages: Validity, Families, Other "click Languages"
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