Lecture | Summer School evening lectures
Prehistoric language contact in Southern Africaː Khoisan traces in modern Bantu languages
- Date
- Thursday 20 July 2023
- Time
- Series
- Summer School evening lectures
- Location
-
Lipsius
Cleveringaplaats 1
2311 BD Leiden - Room
- 003
Abstract
Pre-colonial Southern Africa is characterized by two language groups: Bantu languages, who arrived through southward migrations in the last two thousand years, and Khoisan languages, spoken by some of Southern Africa’s first inhabitants. Contact between these two groups led to the demise of most Khoisan-speaking communities, with only small groups speaking various Khoisan languages remaining nowadays. Khoisan languages are nowadays only spoken in remote areas and their speakers are socially, economically and linguistically dominated by their Bantu-speaking neighbours. However, in spite of their marginalized position today, Khoisan languages and their speakers have exerted strong influence on the Bantu languages of the newcomers that slowly replaced them. In this talk I discuss the changing relations between Bantu and Khoisan speaking communities in Southern Africa over time, based on prehistoric contact-induced changes that can still be identified in the languages of today.