The N|uu Language

History and Rediscovery

N|uu is the last surviving !Ui language, the only remaining member of one branch of the Khoesan languages. The !Ui and Taa languages formed one branch of the southern African Khoesan language family tree, and were the languages of the indigenous hunter-gatherers of South Africa. The small number of remaining speakers indicate that N|uu is moribund, and will become extinct when its last speakers die.

N|uu was first studied and recorded by Dorothea F. Bleek in 1911, although she dealt with two disparate groups of speakers, one from northwestern Gordonia and the other from southeastern Gordonia and parts of Postmasburg. However, since she couldn't compare the two groups, she identified them as ǂKhomani and Nǁn, respectively. In 1997, the South African San Institute (SASI), while working on the ǂKhomani land claim, discovered that one woman, Elsie Valbooi, still spoke the language. 24 more speakers were discovered over the next few years, and it was discovered that Bleek's ǂKhomani and Nǁn languages were really N|uu, a name chosen by the surviving elders to replace ǂKhomani, a word that wasn't even part of the language.

Apartheid drove speakers of N|uu and other San languages to hide their identity and even their language from their children. Their hunter-gatherer lifestyle was despised by the European colonists, and the Nǁnnǂe (speakers of N|uu) lived in wretched poverty, scattering to find employment, intermarrying, and raising their children to speak dominant languages like Afrikaans. These speakers were so good at concealing their language and culture that none of their children have more than passive knowledge of N|uu.

Bibliography

• Bleek, Dorothea F. (2000). The ǁN!ke or Bushmen of Griquland West. Khoisan Forum Working Papers (Tom Güldemann, Ed.), 15:14-16. Köln: University of Köln.
• Bleek, Dorothea F. (2000). Notes on the language of the ǁN!ke or Bushmen of Griquland West. Khoisan Forum Working Papers (Tom Güldemann, Ed.), 15:17-28. Köln: University of Köln.
• Chennells, Roger. (2002). The Khomani San land claim. Cultural Survival Quarterly, 26(1):51-53.
• Collins, Chris. (2004). The absence of the linker in double object constructions in N|uu. Studies in African Linguistics, 33.2:163-198.
• Collins, Chris and Levi Namaseb (2005). Nǀuuki stories. Unpublished manuscript, New York University and the University of Namibia.
• Crawhall, Nigel. (2002). Concordance of Nǀuu Swadesh compared to Khoe Swadesh. Manuscript.
• Crawhall, Nigel. (2004). !Ui-Taa language shift in Gordonia and Postmasburg Districts, South Africa. PhD dissertation, University of Cape Town.
• Crawhall, Nigel. (2005). The story of !Ui: Causality and language shift in Africa. Creating Outsiders: Endangered Languages, Migration and Marginalisation: Proceedings of the Ninth FELConference, Stellenbosch, South Africa, 18-20 November 2005. (Nigel Crawhall and Nicholas Ostler, Eds). Bath, England: Foundation for Endangered Languages. pp. 71-81.
• Crawhall, Nigel. (2005). Too good to leave behind: The N|u language and the ǂKhomani people of Siyanda District. Language and Identities in a Postcolony: Southern African Perspectives (Schriften zur Afrikanistik Band 10) (Rosalie Finlayson and Sarah Slabbert, Eds.). Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang. pp. 67-89.
• Dart, Raymond A[rthur]. (1937). The hut distribution, genealogy and homogeneity of the ǀ'Auni-ǂKhomani Bushmen. Bantu Studies, 11:159-174.
• Dart, Raymond A[rthur]. (1937). The physical characters of the ǀ'Auni-ǂKhomani Bushmen. Bantu Studies, 11:175-246+.
• Doke, C. M. (1936). Games, plays and dances of the ǂKhomani Bushmen. Bantu Studies, 10(4):461-471.
• Doke, C. M. (1936). An outline of ǂKhomani Bushman phonetics. Bantu Studies, 10(4):433-461.
• Kirby, Percival R. (1936). The musical practices of the ǀAuni and ǂKhomani Bushmen. Bantu Studies, 10:373-431.
• Krönlein, J.G. (1861). Manuscript list of the language of the ǀNusan.
• Maingard, L. F. (1937). The ǂKhomani dialect of Bushman: Its morphology and other characteristics. Bushmen of the Southern Kalahari (J.D. Rheinallt Jones and C.M. Doke, Eds.). Johannesburg. Witswatersrand University Press. 237-275.
• Miller, Amanda, Johanna Brugman & Bonny Sands. (2007) Acoustic and auditory analysis of N|uu lingual and linguo-pulmonic stop bursts. Proceedings of the International Congress of Phonetic Sciences XVI, Saarbrücken, Germany, August 2007. pp. 769-772. Available online: http://www.icphs2007.de/conference/Papers/1664/
• Le Roux, Willemien and Alison White (Eds.). (2004). Voices of the San: Living in southern Africa today. Cape Town: Kwela Books.
• Namaseb, Levi. (2006). Language, environment and community in storytelling of Khoekhoe, ǂKhomani, English and Afrikaans in Southern Africa. PhD dissertation. Graduate Department of the Centre for Comparative Literature, University of Toronto.
• Namaseb, Levi, Bonny Sands, Amanda Miller and Johanna Brugman (2005). Let's learn to write Nǀuǃ/Laat ons Nǀu leer skryfǃ/ǀiisi ǀǀxaǀǀxa Nǀu i kaqleke [Electronic primer]. Upington, South Africa.
• Robins, Steven. (2001). Whose 'culture', whose 'survival'? The ǂKhomani San land claim and the cultural politics of 'community' and 'development' in the Kalahari. Africa's Indigenous Peoples: 'First Peoples' or 'Marginalised Minorities'? (Alan Barnard and Justin Kenrick, Eds.). Edinburgh: Centre of African Studies. pp. 229-253.
• Robins, Steven. (2001). NGOs, 'Bushmen' and double vision: The ǂKhomani land claim and the cultural politics of 'community', and 'development' in the Kalahari. Journal of Southern African Studies, 27(4):833-853.
• Sands, Bonny, Johanna Brugman, Mats Exter, Levi Namaseb & Amanda Miller. (2007). Articulatory characteristics of anterior click closures in N|uu. Proceedings of the International Congress of Phonetic Sciences XVI, Saarbrücken, Germany, August 2007. pp. 401-404. Available online: http://www.icphs2007.de/conference/Papers/1540/
• Sands, Bonny, Amanda L. Miller & Johanna Brugman. (2007). The lexicon in Language Attrition: The Case of N|uu. Selected Proceedings of the
  37th Annual Conference on African Linguistics (Doris L. Payne and Jaime Peña, Eds.) pp. 55-65. Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Proceedings Project. Available online: http://www.lingref.com/cpp/acal/37/index.html

Funding for this webpage was provided by the National Science Foundation through "Collaborative Research: Descriptive and Theoretical Studies of N|uu" (PI's Miller-Ockhuizen, Collins, and Sands).