Hadza language
| Hadza | |
|---|---|
| Hazane | |
| Native to | Tanzania |
| Region | Singida region, southeast of Lake Eyasi, camps south and northwest; Manyara region, Iramba and Mbulu districts; Shinyanga region, Masawa District. |
| Ethnicity | 1200–1300 Hazabee (2012 census) |
|
Native speakers
|
1000+ (2012) |
| Language codes | |
| ISO 639-3 | |
| Glottolog | hadz1240 |
Hadza is a language isolate spoken along the shores of Lake Eyasi in Tanzania by fewer than a thousand Hadza people, the last full-time hunter-gatherers in Africa. Despite the small number of speakers, language use is vigorous, with most children learning it. In the late 20th century Hadza was included in a proposed Khoisan language family, largely on the basis of its use of clicks, but this classification is no longer accepted.
According to Ethnologue, Bali may be a dialect of Hadza. The language is marked as "threatened".
Hadza is a language isolate (Sands 1998, Starostin 2013). It was once classified by many linguists as a Khoisan language, along with its neighbor Sandawe, primarily because they both have click consonants. However, Hadza has very few proposed cognates with either Sandawe or the other Khoisan languages, and many of the ones that have been proposed appear doubtful. The links with Sandawe, for example, are Cushitic loan words, whereas the links with southern Africa are so few and so short (usually single consonant–vowel syllables) that they are most likely coincidental. A few words link it with Oropom, which may itself be spurious; the numerals itchâme 'one' and pie 'two' suggest a connection with Kw'adza, an extinct language of hunter-gatherers who may have had recently shifted to Cushitic. (Higher numerals were borrowed in both languages.)
Hadza syllable structure is limited to CV, or CVN if nasal vowels are analyzed as a coda nasal. Vowel-initial syllables do not occur initially, and medially they appear to be equivalent to /hV/.
Hadza is noted for having medial clicks (clicks within morphemes). This distribution is also found in Sandawe and the Nguni Bantu languages, but not in the Khoisan languages of southern Africa. Some of these words are historically derivable from clicks in initial positions (many appear to reflect lexicalized reduplication, for example, and some are due to prefixes), but others are opaque. As in Sandawe, most medial clicks are glottalized, but not all: puche 'a spleen', tanche 'to aim', tacce 'a belt', minca 'to lick one's lips', laqo 'to trip someone', keqhe-na 'slow', penqhenqhe ~ peqeqhe 'to hurry', haqqa-ko 'a stone', shenqe 'to peer over', exekeke 'to listen', naxhi 'to be crowded', khaxxe 'to jump', binxo 'to carry kills under one's belt'.
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