Kwadi language

Kwadi
ǃKwaǀtse
Native toAngola
EthnicityKwadi
Extinct1960s-80s
Dialects
Language codes
ISO 639-3kwz
kwz
Glottologkwad1244

Kwadi /ˈkwɑːdi/ is an extinct "click language" once spoken in the southwest corner of Angola. It became extinct around 1960. There were only fifty Kwadi in the 1950s, of whom only 4–5 were competent speakers of the language. Three partial speakers were known in 1965, but in 1981 no speakers could be found. Salvage work was carried out 2014 with two remembers who had acquired the language from an old speaker while they were children.[3]

Although Kwadi is poorly attested, there is enough data to show that it is a divergent member of the Khoe family, or perhaps cognate with the Khoe languages in a Khoe–Kwadi family. It preserved elements of proto-Khoe that were lost in the western Khoe languages under the influence of Kxʼa languages in Botswana,[4] and other elements that were lost in the eastern Khoe languages.[1]

The Kwadi people, called Kwepe (Cuepe) by the Bantu, appear to have been a remnant population of southwestern African hunter-gatherers, otherwise only represented by the Cimba, Kwisi, and the Damara, who adopted the Khoekhoe language. Like the Kwisi they were fishermen, on the lower reaches of the Coroca River.[5]

Kwadi was alternatively known by varieties of the words Koroka (Ba-koroka, Curoca, Ma-koroko, Mu-coroca) and Cuanhoca.

  1. ^ a b Cite error: The named reference phonology was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
  2. ^ Hammarström, Harald; Forkel, Robert; Haspelmath, Martin, eds. (2017). "Khoe–Kwadi". Glottolog 3.0. Jena, Germany: Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History.
  3. ^ Anne-Maria Fehn & Jorge Rocha (2023) Lost in translation: A historical-comparative reconstruction of Proto-Khoe-Kwadi based on archival data. Diachronica 40:5, p. 609–665.
  4. ^ Güldemann, Tom (August 2006). Changing profile when encroaching on hunter-gatherer territory?: towards a history of the Khoe–Kwadi family in southern Africa. Historical linguistics and hunter-gatherer populations in global perspective. Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology.
  5. ^ Roger, Blench (1999). "Are the African Pygmies an Ethnographic Fiction?". In Biesbrouck; Elders; Rossel (eds.). Challenging Elusiveness: Central African Hunter-Gatherers in a Multidisciplinary Perspective (PDF). Leiden. pp. 41–60. Archived from the original (PDF) on 2012-01-26. Retrieved 2011-10-26.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link)