The Kalahari Basin area: a 'Sprachbund' on the verge of extinction - "The Central Kalahari area with a focus on Hoan (Ju-Hoan family): language contact and population genetics"
Final Report Abstract
In our project on “The Central Kalahari area with a focus on ǂHoan (Ju-ǂHoan family): language contact and population genetics” we aimed at elucidating the relationships among Southern African populations speaking indigenous non-Bantu languages (here called ‘Khoisan’ for convenience) to shed light on their prehistory. These populations are frequently depicted as being linguistically, culturally, and biologically homogeneous, with short-statured, pale-skinned hunter-gatherers speaking languages with a large number of very salient click consonants being considered the prototype. However, in actual fact the Khoisan peoples are diverse in all respects: their languages are classified by specialists into three separate language families that are not demonstrably related; apart from hunter-gatherers, there are also groups who practise pastoralism; and while some of the Khoisan populations are indeed short and light-skinned on average, others are tall and have on average darker skin pigmentation. In particular, our project aimed at answering the following three research questions: Are the observed similarities between the languages (e.g. the salient use of click consonants) due to shared inheritance or to areal contact? Is there any evidence in support of the hypothesis of an East African origin of the peoples speaking Khoe-Kwadi languages? What are the linguistic effects of contact among egalitarian hunter-gatherer groups? With our in-depth molecular anthropological analysis of a comprehensive dataset from a large number of populations from Botswana and Namibia we were able to demonstrate a much larger amount of genetic diversity among the Khoisan populations than hitherto known. Most strikingly, we detect a deep genetic split between populations from the northwestern Kalahari area (predominantly speaking closely related languages) and the southeastern Kalahari area (speaking unrelated languages belonging to three different language families) dated to have taken place within the last 30,000 years. This deep time depth precludes our elucidating whether the three ‘Khoisan’ language families might ultimately share a common ancestor, since detectable traces of linguistic relationship are retained for at most 10-12,000 years. We also see evidence for extensive contact among populations in Southern Africa, both among Khoisan populations and between Khoisan peoples and their neighbours speaking Bantu languages. This provides support for the hypothesis that some similarities between the Khoisan languages might be due to contact-induced changes. Such contact-induced changes can be observed in different linguistic domains in our fine-scaled linguistic investigation of one of the severely endangered Khoisan languages of Botswana, ǂHoan: The newly collected data on this hitherto nearly undescribed language show that ǂHoan shares words as well as phonological features with two unrelated neighbouring languages, Taa and G|ui; furthermore, it has also undergone structural changes under G|ui influence. These observed effects of language contact are in very good accordance with the close genetic relationship observed among the three populations, indicating that the linguistic changes were brought about through intense and close physical interactions. As to the question concerning the possible East African origin of the Khoe-Kwadi languages, we find intriguing evidence for such a connection especially in the Nama, a pastoralist population speaking a Khoe language residing in Namibia. However, this link needs to be investigated in more detail before we can come to secure conclusions.
Publications
- (2011): The sociolinguistic situation of ǂHoan, a moribund 'Khoisan' language of Botswana. Afrikanistik Online 8, 1- 16
Gerlach, Linda & Falko Berthold
- (2012): The genetic prehistory of southern Africa.Nature Communications 3:1143
Pickrell, Joseph K., Patterson, Nick, Barbieri, Chiara, Berthold, Falko, Gerlach, Linda, Lipson, Mark, Loh, Po-Ru, Lachance, Joseph, Güldemann, Tom, Kure, Blesswell, Wata Mpoloka, Sununguko, Nakagawa, Hirosi, Naumann, Christfried, Mountain, Joanna, Bustamante, Carlos, Berger, Bonnie, Tishkoff, Sarah, Henn, Brenna, Stoneking, Mark, Reich, David & Brigitte Pakendorf
(See online at https://doi.org/10.1038/ncomms2140)
