Lecture | Lectures in Historical Linguistics and Philology
Tracing contact and migration in pre-Bantu southern Africa through lexical borrowing
- Date
- Friday 16 May 2025
- Time
- Series
- Lectures in Historical Linguistics and Philology
- Location
-
Lipsius
Cleveringaplaats 1
2311 BD Leiden - Room
- 1.47
Abstract
While recent research in archaeology and genetics has considerably increased our knowledge on the prehistory of southern African populations, new questions about early forager contacts and the advent of food production arise. Assuming that linguistic data can provide valuable clues about the sociohistorical context of early population contact, we explored patterns of vocabulary transfer between languages from three unrelated families comprising the linguistic unit commonly referred to as “Southern African Khoisan”: while the Kx’a and Tuu families are exclusively associated with a forager stratum stretching from the Cape to southern Angola, Khoe-Kwadi speakers have been linked to the introduction of Late Stone Age pastoralism from eastern into southern Africa around 2,000BP.
Using a list of 228 widely attested meanings, we compiled lexical data from 55 linguistic varieties and identified 1,706 roots, 20% of which are shared between at least two families. Applying a carefully chosen set of linguistic and extralinguistic criteria, we traced the origin of 71% of shared roots, with the remaining 29% constituting good candidates for ancient contact or shared common ancestry of the forager families Kx’a and Tuu.
The findings of our comparative analysis show that almost half of lexical roots shared between languages of more than one family trace back to Khoe-Kwadi and were borrowed into languages of other families within two major confluence zones with different sociohistorical profiles: i) the Central Kalahari characterized by egalitarian interaction between languages of all three families, and ii) the southern and southwestern Kalahari Basin fringes showing unilateral transfer from Khoe-Kwadi-speaking herders into resident forager groups.
Taken together, our findings indicate that linguistic contact patterns between the Khoe-Kwadi and their Kx’a and Tuu-speaking neighbours varied across time and space. Khoe-Kwadi languages participate in contact settings involving both multilateral borrowing and unilateral transfer, in line with the historically observed ethnographic diversity characterizing populations speaking languages of this family.