Search for crossword answers and clues
A family of languages spoken in southern Africa
Answer for the clue "A family of languages spoken in southern Africa ", 7 letters:
khoisan
Word definitions for khoisan in dictionaries
The Collaborative International Dictionary
Word definitions in The Collaborative International Dictionary
Hottentot \Hot"ten*tot\, n. [D. Hottentot; -- so called from hot and tot, two syllables of frequent occurrence in their language. --Wedgwood.] (Ethnol.) One of a degraded The language of the Hottentots, which is remarkable for its clicking sounds; the Khoisan ...
Wikipedia
Word definitions in Wikipedia
" Khoisan " (; also spelled Khoesaan , Khoesan or Khoe–San ) is a unifying name for two groups of peoples of Southern Africa , who share physical and putative linguistic characteristics distinct from the Bantu majority of the region. Culturally, the Khoisan ...
Usage examples of khoisan.
The collisions of all those peoples produced the tragedies of modern South Africa: the quick decimation of the Khoisan by European germs and guns.
Instead, this evidence suggested that Pygmies had once been widespread in the rain forest of Central Africa, while Khoisan peoples had been widespread in drier parts of subequatorial Africa.
Those exceptions are two very distinctive, click-laden Khoisan languages named Hadza and Sandawe, stranded in Tanzania more than 1,000 miles from the nearest Khoisan languages of southern Africa.
Even more unexpectedly, clicks or Khoisan words also appear in two Afroasiatic languages spoken by blacks in Kenya, stranded still farther from present Khoisan peoples than are the Hadza and Sandawe peoples of Tanzania.
But to the south lay 2,000 miles of country thinly occupied by Khoisan hunter-gatherers, lacking iron and crops.
Trading and marriage relationships were undoubtedly established between those Khoisan and the Bantu farmers, each occupying different adjacent habitats, just as Pygmy hunter-gatherers and Bantu farmers still do today in equatorial Africa.
An example of such a disease in Africa is malaria, which is borne by mosquitoes that breed around farmers' villages, and to which the invading Bantu had already developed genetic resistance but Khoisan hunter-gatherers probably had not.
Here they encountered a melting pot of Afroasiatic and Nilo-Saharan farmers and herders growing millet and sorghum and raising livestock in drier areas, along with Khoisan hunter-gatherers.
One consequence was that, once South African whites had quickly killed or infected or driven off the Cape's Khoisan population, whites could claim correctly that they had occupied the Cape before the Bantu and thus had prior rights to it.