ayearinlanguage:A Year in Language, Day 200: XhosaToday is Nelson Mandela’s 100th birthday (or would
ayearinlanguage:A Year in Language, Day 200: XhosaToday is Nelson Mandela’s 100th birthday (or would be, if he was still living), so I think it’s fitting to pay tribute to his native tongue, and that of 8 million other people in South Africa: Xhosa. Xhosa is a Bantu language (written isiXhosa to include its Bantu prefix), a member of the Nguni family. You may have noticed I don’t normally include sub-branches of Bantu languages in these posts; this is because there is a lot of differing opinions among linguists as to the best way to internally structure the massive language family. But Nguni is a widely recognized branch notable for its inclusion of click consonants, and also includes Zulu and Swazi.When discussing Xhosa the first question in your average westerners mind is, ‘how do I pronounce the word “Xhosa”?’ In English we generally say it like “kosa”, /koʊsa/, because we would struggle to produce the aspirated lateral click written “xh”. Xhosa has three series of click consonants, which pattern to a grand total of 18 distinct consonants. The three broad varieties of clicks are: 1. Dental clicks, generally written as “c” or a digraph thereof, and sound like the noise you make when going “tsk-tsk!” (tongue sucking on the back of your front teeth)2. Lateral dental clicks, called so because while the tongue is in mostly the same position as the dental click, the sucking action occurs at the side of the mouth. This is the noise equestrians use to usher a horse forward. In writing it is signified with an “x” or digraph, like the aspirated “xh” of “Xhosa”3. Postalveolar clicks, written with a “q”. To continue the equestrian theme, in English this is the sound that you might make to imitate the sound of a horse clopping.All three broad types come in 6 contrasting variations. They can be “tenuis” (the linguistic terms meaning “plain”, i.e. not aspirated, voiced, glottalized, etc.), aspirated (said with an extra puff of air), slack voice (I’ll explain this one in a moment), nasal, nasal+slack voice, or nasal+glottalized (said with a simultaneous closure of the glottis, aka. vocal cords). As you may be aware, “voicing” in linguistics refers to the vibrating of the vocal chords, most languages distinguish two levels of voicing (also called “phonation”): voiced and voiceless. English does this; its the distinction between /p/ and /b/, and /f/ and /v/, and /s/ and /z/, etc. Xhosa, on the other hand, has “slack voice”. The easiest way to think of this is as “half-voicing”. The vocal chords aren’t so open they don’t vibrate (as in voiceless consonants) or pulled as tight as they are for voicing.Clicks aren’t the only uncommon consonants found in Xhosa. The slack voice distinction is found in most of its consonants, including nasals and approximates (sounds like /w/, /j/, and /l/). There is a single implosive, /ɓ/, which is like a /b/ but said with an intake of air, and lateral fricatives, the s/l sounds also common in South American languages.Xhosa has all the typical trappings of a Bantu languages; 10+ genders determined by prefixes, polypersonal verb agreement (agreeing with subject and object), and agglutinative morphology. Xhosa has a number of pop-culture claims to fame, including being the native language of Trevor Noah, host of the Daily Show, and the language of Wakanda in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. -- source link