Author Shawn Khefets
The !Xóõ language, also known as Taa, is a language spoken around the border of Botswana and Namibia and it is famous for, perhaps, the most absurd phonemic inventory in the world. With counts of between 80 to 160 consonants, many of which are click sounds, such as ǀ, ǁ, ǂ, ʘ, ! (Yes, these are the symbols used to write them), approximately 30 vowels and between 2 and 4 tones, the !Xóõ language is a true testament to the magic that is human communication.
Let’s talk about this language, examine the sound system, and try to understand how any of this is possible!
First off - classification: where does !Xóõ come from, and where is it spoken? Back in the 1950s and 1960s, linguist Joseph Greenberg (1915-2001) tried to categorize all African languages into a few “macro-language families”, one of which being the Khoisan language family. Today, Khoisan, as a language family, is widely rejected as a linguistic classification, but the term is still used today as a general “term of convenience”, mostly to demonstrate the geographical distribution of “the languages that have click consonants, and do not belong to other African language families”. Remember - just because 2 languages have similar sounds, even if they’re as exotic and rare as click consonants, that doesn’t necessarily mean that they are immediately related to each other. Today, the former Khoisan languages are split into 3 small language families - the Khoe-Kwadi, Kx’a and Tuu, all spoken around southwestern Africa, as well as 2 language isolates - Sandawe and Hadza spoken in Tanzania. Today’s topic, the !Xóõ language, is pretty much the last surviving member of the Tuu language family (there’s another “live” one called Nǁng, but as of 2021, there’s only really officially 1 surviving native speaker, so it’s probably going be gone very soon unfortunately, leaving just !Xóõ and its dialects.
When it comes to people, those who speak !Xóõ (along with other languages from other language families in the area) belong to a broadly-defined ethnic group called the San Peoples, also known as Basarwa, also known as the Bushmen. Most of them are a part of hunter-gatherer societies, speculated to be some of the oldest surviving cultures in the world. These people are oftentimes involved in hunting wild game, as well as foraging food. They use spears, as well as bows and arrows, sometimes even with poison gathered from beetle larvae. Leisure is very important in these societies and many of them have a lot of complex ritual dances, cave paintings, music, games and a myriad of cultural activities, which you would have to learn if you ever want to be fluent in the language. Remember - you can’t be fluent in a language without being fluent in the culture!
In any case, let’s move on to the linguistics of the language! When it comes to vowels, there are 5 basic vowels - a, e, i, o, u. However, there are also 5 phonation types per vowel. Phonation, basically, refers to how much you constrict your vocal cords and how much they vibrate when pronouncing a certain speech sound, modifying the airstream, which leads to a difference in how a sound… sounds. The 5 phonation types in !Xóõ are: modal voice, glottalized, breathy voice, pharyngealized and strident. Additionally, each vowel can also be nasalized. All of this brings the total numbers of distinct vowels to approximately 30. We say “approximately”, because there is variation between certain dialects, and there’s a whole lot more that goes into it, such as phonotactic restrictions, syllable onset, context, etc., which may also vary heavily from community to community, speaker to speaker.
We also mentioned that there are between 2 and 4 tones. The thing is, some studies from the 70s, 80s and 90s claim 4 tones (high, mid-falling, mid, low); (super high, high, low, super low). However, other, more recent studies claim to have re-examined this and that there are only really 2 tones, and the reason for this discrepancy has to do with “morae”, which is a unit of time equal to or shorter than a syllable. Tones are a component of grammar, meaning it influences the agreement between nouns, verbs, adjectives, etc., and so, they looked at different phrases and how the pitch contours vary, and the conclusion they came to is that it’s likely just 2 tones that have variation in length and intonation in certain cases, and it’s probably not actually 4 distinct tones. The bottomline is that tones are really cool, and languages with a crazy amount of vowels and consonants that also have tones are even cooler because of how difficult it would be to learn to speak this.
Now let’s move on to the most exciting part - the consonants! In the beginning we said that there are between 80 to 160 consonants. For reference, Castilian Spanish has 19 consonants, Standard British English has 24 consonants, Modern Standard Arabic has 28 consonants. So, how is this possible and what’s with this crazy difference in counting them? In order to understand this, we first need to understand the types of consonants that !Xóõ has. (By the way, there are 2 main dialect clusters, Eastern and Western, and even though it works the same way, they have slightly different counts, but for the sake of simplicity, we’ll mostly be talking about the Western dialect).
!Xóõ has 3 types of consonants, in other words, it utilizes 3 airstream mechanisms to produce consonants. These are:
1) Pulmonic egressive, which are the sounds we are all used to - every single language in the world has these, it’s just your regular consonants exactly like you think of them (b, k, l, m, n, p, r, s, t, etc.). “Egressive” basically means breathing out; we breathe out when we produce these sounds.
2) Glottalic egressive, also known as “ejectives”. These are rarer across the world, and English doesn’t really have them, but they shouldn’t be too difficult to pronounce. As the name “ejective” suggests, you basically “eject” your regular consonants with a bit more force than usual.
3) Lingual/velar ingressive, also known as the “click consonants”. While “egressive” means breathing out, “ingressive” means breathing in; we breathe in slightly when producing these sounds.
Next, we break down the click consonants even more - there are 5 basic types of click consonants, and we’ll start with the ones that most English speakers should at least be familiar with: the dental click (ǀ) which is sort of like when you disapprove of something your kid did - *tsk tsk tsk*. Then there’s the lateral click (ǁ) which is how you would call a horse. Next is the alveolar click (ǃ) which is how some people imitate a horse running, or a clock ticking. The fourth type is the palatal click (ǂ) which may sound very similar to the dental click, but it’s different - instead of having your tongue touch the front of your mouth and your teeth, it’s higher than that, at the back of your palate, where you just sort of curl your tongue back a bit against the roof of your mouth, and release it. And the final type is the bilabial click (ʘ) and it’s basically just your lips touching off of each other, almost like a kiss, but less tense. Keep in mind that there are a few other types of clicks out there in other languages, but these are the five basic types of clicks present in the !Xóõ language. By the way, about 70% of the words in the dictionary begin with a click!
Anyway, that was indeed a lot of technical information, but now you should have an understanding of all the different basic types of consonants that this language has, but don’t worry… because it’s way more complicated than that. Additionally, consonants may have a few other properties that would make them different from the basic types, in other words, that would turn them into different phonemes able to change the meaning of a word or sentence. These are important to define before we carry on:
- “Aspiration” is when a burst of breath accompanies a consonant, either before or after.
- “Nasalization” is when some air escapes through the nose rather than the mouth when producing a consonant.
- “Glottalization” is when there is more emphasis in the back of your throat, and the sound produced is more guttural.
- “Voiced” vs. “Voiceless”. This has to do with the vocal cords vibrating during the production of the consonant. Try touching your glottis (the middle of your neck/throat), and then try pronouncing the letters “S” and then “Z” and compare. That’s how you distinguish voiced and voiceless - the vocal cords don’t vibrate when you say S, so the S is voiceless. The vocal cords vibrate when you say Z, so the Z is voiced. And now let’s have a look at the full IPA chart of the consonants of !Xóõ so that you can more easily visualize how all of this is structured.
First, highlighted in red, are the ordinary regular pulmonic egressive consonants that all of us know and love. Next, in blue, are the regular ejectives, which we might not know and love very well, but they shouldn’t be too difficult for us to use. And lastly, in green, are the clicks. Now, if you’ll notice, there are a whole lot more than just 5 like we discussed earlier. Actually, 43, to be exact. Starting from the top, there are the plain basic ones. Turns out, in this language, clicks are also able to be voiced, they can be aspirated - both voiced and voiceless, you can have a click that is also an ejective at the same time, and also either voiced or voiceless, clicks can also be nasalized, both voiced and voiceless, and finally, they can be glottalized. All together, this chart shows a grand total of 87 consonants all together. And guess what - we’re still not done yet! We just looked at 87 consonants, but what about the other 80, in order to get to the “160 number” mentioned in the beginning? Well, this is where we enter “Cluster Territory”.
Because 87 consonants is obviously not enough, speakers of !Xóõ decided to just jumble a bunch of them together, creating “consonant clusters”. Here is a separate IPA chart that illustrates those clusters.
You have a few easy ones, like “t” and “x” together, which is just “tx”, or “d”, “z” and “x” together, which is just “dzx” (found in the 2nd and 3rd column from the left respectively). However, the vast majority are absolutely ridiculous. Look at this thing for example “ gǁqx’ “ (found in the right-most column) - a voiced lateral click combined with a uvular affricate voiceless ejective. We can’t even begin to imagine how in the world that’s possible to pronounce, but it is, and it’s used productively by speakers of !Xóõ day to day. There are a total of 77 consonant clusters in this chart.
Now, because consonant clusters are not basic consonants on their own, you can see how the count of the total amount of consonants can be so varied over decades of research. Especially since for a lot of these, it’s impossible to hear the difference for the untrained ear, and double especially, when you’re recording a native speaker speaking at normal speed and you, as a researcher, don’t speak the language. You have to analyze this stuff under a microscope to be able to hear the difference between the phonemes.
Let’s summarize - with 87 consonants (43 of which are clicks), and 77 consonant clusters (most of which also include a click), according to a paper by Christfried Naumann (linked below), which itself is a summary of many different studies spanning decades, if you wanted to make the title of this article as “clickbaity” as possible, and count consonant clusters as separate consonants, that’s how you get the figure of 164 consonants in the !Xóõ language. In general, it might be best to keep consonants and consonant clusters separate, but even then, 87 consonants not counting the clusters. It’s difficult to see how there has ever been, or could ever be another natural human language that reaches this level of phonemic and phonological absurdity.
Now, there are many more fascinating things to say about this incredible language and its people - the grammar is also quite different from many European languages and has a lot of very interesting aspects to it. It’s a bit too complicated to get into in this article, but it is highly encouraged to check out the studies linked below, which go into a great amount of detail on everything, and with many examples.
Nevertheless, before we conclude for today, it’s worth mentioning one final mind blowing fact. There have been a lot of people working tirelessly over the years to document, analyze and understand this exotic language and the people who speak it. However, there is one particular person, without whom none of it would be possible - a South African linguist by the name of Anthony Traill. He went on nearly 100 expeditions over 35 years to try to learn and document the !Xóõ language. He published countless papers on it, including the Dictionary. Apart from English and !Xóõ, he was also fluent in Zulu, Tsonga, Tswana and Afrikaans. When searching his name online, one fact that keeps popping up everywhere is this: “Traill developed a lump on his larynx after speaking the language for a long time, which is typical of adult native !Xóõ speakers, but not children, a testament to his time spent with the language.” That sounded almost unbelievable, how can you develop a lump in your throat from speaking a language? However, after a bit of googling and seeing this same fact appear in multiple different articles, on multiple different websites, and even a scientific study, it turns out that it’s probably true. Speaking this language isn’t just very challenging from a phonological standpoint, but it also, quite literally, takes a physical toll on your body - you develop an actual lump on your larynx from speaking it. That is madness, but also so very cool.
In any case, this is where today’s story comes to an end. If you come from a community that speaks an endangered language, please, keep speaking it, keep living it, and pass it on to the next generation, because in the vast, vast majority of cases, once it’s gone, it’s gone forever. And if you’re simply interested in learning a language, any language at all, even !Xóõ, then just do it. Remember - there is no such thing as a “useless” language, and anyone who tells you otherwise is wrong, and you shouldn’t listen to them. Thank you very much for reading, may you have a wonderful day, and please do check out the sources in the bibliography below!
About the author:
Linguistics, geography and history are my biggest interests. Having studied and worked in multiple countries across Europe, my passion has brought me to pursue a master's degree in Indigenous Language Documentation in Canada, where I work closely with First Nations communities to support and document their incredible language revitalization programs. My specific interest extends to everything and anything endangered - the more obscure, and the less known, the more interesting it is to me. My dream is to one day be able to travel around the world, record, film, document and bring to light as many of the thousands of the unique languages and cultures that exist as I can.
Bibliography:
Special thanks to UCLA Phonetics Lab! (Where you can browse the many examples and hear the language spoken authentically by native speakers)https://archive.phonetics.ucla.edu/Language/NMN/nmn.html
Main studies:
- Christfried Naumann. The phoneme inventory of Taa (West !Xoon dialect). Max-Planck-Institut für evolutionäre Anthropologie Leipzig & Universität Leipzig. 2013
- Roland Kießling. Noun classification in !Xoon. Hamburg. 2008
- Christfried Naumann. A preliminary classification of Taa dialects. 20th International Conference on Historical Linguistics (ICHLXX). Humboldt University Berlin; Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology Leipzig.
- Christfried Naumann. High and low tone in Taa (!Xóõ). 2008
Other studies:
- Lee J. Pratchett. Anthony Traill (edited by Hirosi Nakagawa and Andy Chebanne), A trilingual !Xóõ dictionary: !Xóõ – English – Setswana. 2018
- Catherine T. Best, Anthony Traill, Allyson Carter, K. David Harrison, and Alice Faber. !Xóõ click perception by English, Isizulu, and Sesotho listeners. 2003
- Alena Witzlack-Makarevich and Hirosi Nakagawa. Linguistic features and typologies in languages commonly referred to as ‘Khoisan’. 2017
- Christfried Naumann. Vowels of Taa (West !Xoon) and their acoustic properties (Presentation). Humboldt-Universitat zu Berlin. 2013
Interesting articles/other stuff:
- DOBES Documentation of Taa Language.
https://dobes.mpi.nl/projects/taa/
- Clicks and Voice Quality in !Xóõ samples. (LMU of Munich)
https://www.phonetik.uni-muenchen.de/studium/skripten/languagedemos/Demos/xoo.html
- Xoa ke Taa ǂAan -!Xuun ǀa ǂxanya - A Primer for Writing Taa -West !Xoon version. 2015. Christfried Naumann & Many others. (Illustrations by Stefanus Kuwi Geinǂamseb and Johannes ǁXau Kundeb)
- The Economist. We went in search of the world’s hardest language. 2016. https://medium.economist.com/we-went-in-search-of-the-worlds-hardest-language-95a27c2cff3
- Anthony Traill. A !Xóõ DICTIONARY. Köln. 1994.
Videos:
- The Language with the Most Sounds in the World - !Xóõ
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vFE6TOoDmo8