The Khoe–Kwadi languages are a family consisting of the

Khoe languages The Khoi languages are the largest of the non- Bantu language families indigenous to Southern Africa. They were once considered to be a branch of a Khoisan language family, and were known as Central Khoisan in that scenario. Though Khoisan is ...

of southern Africa and the poorly attested extinct

Kwadi language Kwadi was a " click language" once spoken in the southwest corner of Angola. It went extinct some time around 1960. There were only fifty Kwadi in the 1950s, of whom only 4–5 were competent speakers of the language. Three partial speakers wer ...

of Angola. The relationship has been worked out by Tom Güldemann, Edward Elderkin and Anne-Maria Fehn.

Classification

Pronouns and some basic vocabulary have been reconstructed as being common to Khoe and Kwadi. Because Kwadi is poorly attested, it is difficult to tell which common words are cognate and which might be loans, but about 50 lexical correspondences and a common verb construction have been identified. Westphal's fieldnotes on Kwadi were still being analyzed as of 2018, with the hope that additional grammatical parallels could be identified. Güldemann (forthcoming) reports the following reconstructed pronominal system, of a minimal/augmented type: where "E" is an undetermined front vowel and the pronoun base was a deictic like *xa or a generic noun like *kho 'person'. The 3rd-person suffixes were also used on nouns, which in addition had a dual suffix *-da. Both Kwadi and the Khoe languages have verb constructions where the first, dependent verb is marked by a suffix *-(a)Ra and the following, finite verb is unmarked. The nearest relative of Khoe–Kwadi may be the Sandawe isolate; the Sandawe pronoun system is very similar to that of Kwadi–Khoe, but there are not enough known correlations for regular sound correspondences to be worked out. However, the relationship has some predictive value, for example if the

back-vowel constraint Click consonants, or clicks, are speech sounds that occur as consonants in many languages of Southern Africa and in three languages of East Africa. Examples familiar to English-speakers are the '' tut-tut'' (British spelling) or '' tsk! tsk!'' ...

, which operates in the Khoe languages but not in Sandawe, is taken into account.

Notes

References

*Güldemann, Tom and Edward D. Elderkin (2010) 'On External Genealogical Relationships of the Khoe Family.' in Brenzinger, Matthias and Christa König (eds.), ''Khoisan Languages and Linguistics: the Riezlern Symposium 2003.'' Quellen zur Khoisan-Forschung 17. Köln: Rüdiger Köpp

*Güldemann and Fehn (2014
'Kwadi perspective on Khoe verb-juncture constructions'
*Güldemann, Tom (forthcoming)
'Person-gender-number marking from Proto-Khoe-Kwadi to its descendants: a rejoinder with particular reference to language contact.'

Classification

Notes

References

Further reading