Lecture | Descriptive Linguistics Seminars
The spread of clicks throughout the Sotho lexicon: borrowing, insertion, and just a hint of regular sound change
- Date
- Friday 14 March 2025
- Time
- Location
-
Lipsius
Cleveringaplaats 1
2311 BD Leiden - Room
- 1.21
Abstract
Clicks are crosslinguistically very rare: as inherited phonemes, they only occur in the Khoisan languages of Eastern and Southern Africa, and through contact, they have spread to neighbouring Cushitic and especially Bantu languages. While the ultimate Khoisan origin of clicks in non-Khoisan languages is undisputed, the mechanisms and motivations behind this contact-induced change are varied and little-understood. In this paper, I investigate the way clicks were incorporated into Southern Sotho, a Bantu language of Lesotho and South Africa where clicks have a relatively low functional load. Using language-internal and comparative data from neighbouring and related Bantu languages, I trace the role of processes such as click borrowing, where clicks entered the language through lexical borrowings which were not, or not completely, adapted to the phonology of the recipient language; click loss, where an original click was replaced by a non-click; and click insertion, where an original non-click was replaced by a click. The possible motivating factors behind click insertion are discussed, including hlonipha, the in-law avoidance language practiced by certain Southern Bantu communities, including the Southern Sotho; sound symbolism; but also regular sound change.