From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Hadza is a language isolate along the southern shores of Lake Eyasi in Tanzania, with fewer than a thousand speakers. The Hadza are still primarily hunter-gatherers, though there have been repeated efforts to settle them. Despite the small number of speakers, language use is vigorous, with most children learning it. However, the recent eradication of the tsetse fly from Hadza lands has cleared the way for cattle herders, charcoal burners, game hunters, and farmers, and the Hadza are losing their water, forest, food, and land to overexploitation and pollution.

Hadza has traditionally been classified as a Khoisan language, along with its neighbor Sandawe, primarily because they both have clicks. 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, appear to be Cushitic loan words, while the links with southern Africa are so few and short (usually single CV syllables) that they could easily be coincidence. There are also a few apparent cognates with the possibly spurious Oropom language.

In 2003 the press widely reported suggestions by Alec Knight and Joanna Mountain of Stanford University that the original human language may have had clicks. The evidence for this is genetic: the Juǀʼhoan and the Hadza have the most divergent known mitochondrial DNA of any human populations, suggesting that they were the first, or at least among the first, surviving peoples to have split off the family tree. In other words, the three primary genetic divisions of humanity are the Hadzabe, the Juǀʼhoansi and relatives, and everyone else. Since two of the three groups speak languages with clicks, perhaps their common ancestral language, which by implication is the ancestral language for all humankind, had clicks as well. However, this conclusion rests on several unsupported assumptions:

• Both groups have kept their languages intact, without language shift, since the origin of humanity;
• Neither borrowed clicks as part of a Sprachbund, as the Xhosa and Sotho did; and
• Neither the ancestors of the Juǀʼhoansi nor those of the Hadzabe developed clicks independently.

Intriguingly, Alec Knight himself suggests a practical advantage to clicks: When hunting, the Juǀʼhoansi report that they do not use regular speech, which might spook their prey, but communicate solely by means of hand gestures and clicks. (The Hadzabe are mostly solitary hunters, at least currently.) If he's right, and clicks do provide an advantage to savanna hunters, then it is untenable to assume that they have not arisen independently, or at least not spread from one group to another, over the last several tens of thousands of years. However, the Hadza have almost no clicks in their specialized hunting vocabulary, such as the hunting names of animals.

It is not known if Hadza has lexical tone. It may have a pitch accent system, but the details have not been worked out.

Hadza has five vowels, [i e a o u]. Long vowels may occur when intervocalic [ɦ] is elided. For example, [kʰaɦa] or [kʰaː], to climb. Nasal vowels, while uncommon, do occur. Vowels are also nasalized before voiceless nasal clicks.

The labial ejective /pʼ/ is only found in a few words. The labial click /ŋ̊ʘʔ/ is found in a single word and alternates with /ŋ̊ǀʔ/. The lateral /l/ is found as a flap [ɾ] between vowels and occasionally elsewhere.

• Sands, Bonny E. (1998) 'The Linguistic Relationship between Hadza and Khoisan' In Schladt, Matthias (ed.) Language, Identity, and Conceptualization among the Khoisan (Quellen zur Khoisan-Forschung Vol. 15), Köln: Rüdiger Köppe, 265-283.
• Bonny Sands, Ian Maddieson, Peter Ladefoged (1993). 'The Phonetic Structures of Hadza', UCLA Working Papers in Phonetics, No. 84: Fieldwork Studies in Targeted Languages.
• A.N. Tucker, M.A. Bryan, and James Woodburn as co-author for Hadza (1977). 'The East African Click Languages: A Phonetic Comparison'. In J.G. Moehlig, Franz Rottland, Bernd Heine, eds, Zur Sprachgeschichte und Ethnohistorie in Afrika. Berlin: Dietrich Diener Verlag.

• Hadza bibliography
• Ethnologue Report for Hadza
• Science article speculating on the status of clicks in the original human language (PDF file)
• Hadza wordlist and sound files at UCLA