ǀXam language
extinct language of South Africa and Lesotho
ǀXam (pronounced [ǀ͡kxam] , ǀXam: ǀXam-ka ǃei, in English as KAHM) is an extinct language (or possibly cluster of languages) from South Africa formerly spoken by the ǀXam people. It is part of the ǃUi branch of the Tuu languages and closely related to the moribund Nǁng and Tumʔi languages, the latter of which might be at least partially composed of words from ǀXam. Apart from the possibility of it continuing as Tumʔi, the last known speakers died in the 1910s.
Much of the scholarly work on ǀXam was performed by Wilhelm Bleek and Lucy Lloyd. Wilhelm Bleek, a German linguist of the 19th century based in Cape Town, first studied a variety of ǀXam spoken at Achterveld. Later, he and Lloyd spent decades working with ǁkabbo, Diaǃkwāin, ǀaǃkúṅta, ǃkweiten-ta-ǁken, ǀhaṅǂkassʼō and other speakers to document the dialects spoken by the clans in the area of the Strandberg (Clan of the 'Plain people') and Katkop mountains (Clan of the 'Grass People'), and to capture their stories and mythology. The surviving corpus of ǀXam comes from the stories told by and vocabulary recorded from these individuals in the Bleek and Lloyd Collection. A number of them was published in 1911 under Specimens of Bushman Folklore.
Name
The pipe at the beginning of the name "ǀXam" represents a dental click, like the English interjection tsk, tsk! used to express pity or shame.
The public source identifies “ǀXam language” as extinct language of South Africa and Lesotho. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around ǀXam, language and extinct.
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Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 26, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q2086145. The Library of Congress control number is sh85072151. None of the 1 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1911.
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This entry incorporates text from “ǀXam language” 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.