Project Details
Projekt
The Kalahari Basin area: a 'Sprachbund' on the verge of extinction - "Inheritance and contact in a language complex: the case of Taa varieties (Tuu family)"
Applicant
Professor Dr. Tom Güldemann
Subject Area
General and Comparative Linguistics, Experimental Linguistics, Typology, Non-European Languages
Term
from 2009 to 2014
Project identifier
Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 135192123
The only surviving member of the Tuu family (formerly Southern Khoisan ) with a substantial number of speakers is the Taa language complex. It is a large cluster of dialects spoken by small bands of former hunter-gatherers (commonly referred to as San ) and stretching geographically from eastcentral Namibia from the Nossob River over the former Aminuis reserve into the Ghanzi and Kgalagadi Districts of Botswana up to a line Okwa-Tsetseng-Dutlwe-Werda. Mutual intelligibility usually exists between neighboring varieties, but differences between geographically remote dialects can amount to a linguistic distance found between languages. According to the presently available data the Taa complex seems to fall into two major units, namely West !Xoon (spoken exclusively in Namibia) vs. the rest comprising all other varieties, from ’N|ohan (spoken on both sides of the Namibia-Botswana border) to East !Xoon (the easternmost Taa dialect in Botswana). Today West !Xoon and ’N|ohan are no longer separated geographically and socially because both speech communities have been pushed constantly towards the Botswana border and now intermingle there.
DFG Programme
Research Grants
International Connection
Denmark, Netherlands, United Kingdom
