Khoe languages
language family
The Khoe or Khoi ( KWAY) languages are the largest of the non-Bantu language families indigenous to Southern Africa.
The most numerous and only well-known Khoe language is Khoekhoe (Nama/Damara) of Namibia. The rest of the family is found predominantly in the Kalahari Desert of Botswana. The languages are similar enough that a fair degree of communication is possible between Khoekhoe and the languages of Botswana.
The Khoe languages were the first Khoisan languages known to European colonists and are famous for their clicks, though these are not as extensive as in other Khoisan language families. There are two primary branches of the family, Khoekhoe of Namibia and South Africa, and Tshu–Khwe of Botswana and Zimbabwe. Except for Nama, they are under pressure from national or regional languages such as Tswana.
History
Tom Güldemann believes agro-pastoralist people speaking the Khoe–Kwadi proto-language entered modern-day Botswana about 2000 years ago from the northeast (that is, from the direction of the modern Sandawe), where they had likely acquired agriculture from the expanding Bantu, at a time when the Kalahari was more amenable to agriculture. The ancestors of the Kwadi (and perhaps the Damara) continued west, whereas those who settled in the Kalahari absorbed speakers of Juu languages. Thus, the Khoe family proper has a Juu influence.
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This entry incorporates text from “Khoe languages” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.