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Introduction
I am a linguist specializing in historical relations and contact patterns between the four (pre-colonial) southern African language families, Kx'a, Tuu, Khoe-Kwadi, and Bantu. My main interest is with the Khoe-Kwadi family: I focus on the description of under-documented Kalahari Khoe varieties from the northern and eastern Kalahari Basin fringe, as well as on the historical link between Khoe and the extinct Angolan language Kwadi. At present, I am working on establishing a historical model for the dialectal diversity and geographic dispersal of the Khwe language spoken in Angola, Namibia and Botswana.
My work is explicitly multi-disciplinary and takes into account results and methodologies from human evolutionary genetics and bioinformatics.
Current institution
Additional affiliations
July 2019 - present
Position
- Researcher
Description
- Combining results and methods from linguistics and human evolutionary genetics to gain new insights into the population history of southern Africa and beyond...
January 2016 - January 2019
May 2015 - June 2019
Education
October 2010 - December 2014
October 2004 - September 2010
Publications
Publications (60)
Mainly spoken in Namibia and Botswana, Khoe-Kwadi languages belong to the
typological unit “Southern African Khoisan,” which is most prominently defined by the
existence of phonemic click consonants. Typologically, Khoe-Kwadi languages share
characteristics that set them aside from neighboring Khoisan languages of the Kx’a and Tuu families, includi...
Here, we provide new perspectives on the relationship between the extinct Angolan language Kwadi and the Khoe languages of southern Africa. Using an innovative approach which combines newly collected data from two Kwadi rememberers with a reanalysis of historical recordings and fieldnotes, we were able to reconstitute the Kwadi phoneme inventory an...
The populations of the Angolan Namib Desert have been largely neglected in previous surveys of the genomic landscape of southern Africa. Although at present the Namib is culturally dominated by Southwest Bantu-speaking cattle-herders, the region exhibits an extraordinary ethnographic diversity which includes an array of semi-nomadic peoples whose s...
The present-day diversity of southern African populations was shaped by the confluence of three major pre-historic settlement layers associated with distinct linguistic strata: i) an early occupation by foragers speaking languages of the Kx'a and Tuu families; ii) a Late Stone Age migration of pre-Bantu pastoralists from eastern Africa associated w...
The Khoe-Kwadi language family makes up part of the typological unit “Southern African Khoisan” and is currently distributed across Botswana, Namibia, Angola, Zimbabwe and South Africa. Despite a recent surge of new data from a broad range of languages, no descriptive or comparative study on the expression of commands has been undertaken. In this a...
The present article analyzes the meaning and form of onomatopoeias in Tjwao, a Khoe-Kwadi (Kalahari Khoe) language. Making use of a prototype approach to categorization, a corpus of 113 onomatopoeic lexemes were tested for their compliance with the semantic, phonetic, and morphological features associated with the prototype of onomatopoeias in scho...
Ancient DNA studies reveal the genetic structure of Africa before the expansion of Bantu-speaking agriculturalists; however, the impact of now extinct hunter-gatherer and herder societies on the genetic makeup of present-day African groups remains elusive. Here, we uncover the genetic legacy of pre-Bantu populations from the Angolan Namib Desert, w...
Background
While the human oral microbiome is known to play an important role in systemic health, its average composition and diversity patterns are still poorly understood. To gain better insights into the general composition of the microbiome on a global scale, the characterization of microbiomes from a broad range of populations, including non-i...
This article reports some results of the first large-scale, comprehensive survey of the phonological systems of the Khoisan languages of the Kalahari Basin Area. These languages are famous for their large sets of click phonemes, a typologically rare characteristic otherwise found only in a limited number of languages worldwide. They are also unique...
Multiverbal predicates constitute a defining feature of the Kalahari Basin linguistic area of southern Africa encompassing the Kx'a, Tuu, and Khoe-Kwadi language families. Here, we focus on a complex predicate type restricted to the Khoe-Kwadi family's Khoe branch which involves a linker morpheme and is thus referred to as Juncture-Verb Constructio...
This article concludes the special issue of Stellenbosch Papers in Linguistics Plus dedicated to the diachrony of Serial Verb Constructions. The authors of the ten contributions included in the volume discuss the most important results of their studies and suggest the possible lines for future research.
The forced migration of millions of Africans during the Atlantic Slave Trade led to the emergence of new genetic and linguistic identities, thereby providing a unique opportunity to study the mechanisms giving rise to human biological and cultural variation. Here we focus on the archipelago of São Tomé and Príncipe in the Gulf of Guinea, which host...
The present paper provides a systematic description of interjections in a moribund Eastern Kalahari Khoe language – Tjwao. After analysing original evidence within a prototype-driven approach, the authors conclude the following: (a) in Tjwao, the interjectional lexical class constitutes an internally diverse category confined between the canonical...
This is the first draft of a Ts'ixa (Kalahari Khoe) dictionary which is first and foremost meant to be used by the community, i.e., the speakers themselves. However, besides the community orthography developed and agreed upon during a workshop in 2011, the dictionary also includes IPA transliterations, as well as tone markings for all entries. The...
This paper uses historical-comparative approaches in combination with quantitative methods to analyse data from a survey of varieties of the Bantu languages Herero and Kuvale spoken by ethnically diverse groups from southwestern Angola. We assess the status and position of the underdocu-mented "Kuvale" variety in relation to its closest geographic...
The Bantu expansion, which started in West Central Africa around 5,000 BP, constitutes a major migratory movement involving the joint spread of peoples and languages across sub-Saharan Africa. Despite the rich linguistic and archaeological evidence available, the genetic relationships between different Bantu-speaking populations and the migratory r...
In this article we present comparative data on visual hunting signals from the Kalahari Basin Area of southern Africa, encompassing three Kalahari Khoe-speaking (Ts’ixa, Buga, ǁAni) and one Kx’a-speaking group (Juǀ’hoan). For the comparison, an analysis of handshapes, handedness and iconicity in the individual data sets was conducted. Being applied...
The Bantu expansion, which started in West Central Africa around 5,000 BP, constitutes a major migratory movement involving the joint spread of peoples and languages across sub-Saharan Africa. Despite the rich linguistic and archaeological evidence available, the genetic relationships between different Bantu-speaking populations and the migratory r...
Contrary to what non-practitioners might expect, the systems of phonetic notation used by linguists are highly idiosyncratic. Not only do various linguistic subfields disagree on the specific symbols they use to denote the speech sounds of languages, but also in large databases of sound inventories considerable variation can be found. Inspired by r...
A History of African Linguistics - edited by H. Ekkehard Wolff June 2019
The Kalahari Khoe language Khwe can be considered one of the best-documented Khoe-Kwadi languages with a considerable corpus of published materials, including a grammar, dictionary and extensive text collection. However, despite the recognized status of Khwe as a dialect cluster, the focus of scholarly research has mostly been on the ||Xom variety...
Southwestern Angola is a region characterized by contact between indigenous foragers and incoming food-producers, involving genetic and cultural exchanges between peoples speaking Kx’a, Khoe-Kwadi, and Bantu languages. Although present-day Bantu speakers share a patrilocal residence pattern and matrilineal principle of clan and group membership, a...
The Khoe-Kwadi languages of the northeastern Kalahari Basin fringe belong to the family's Kalahari Khoe subgroup. This article presents new data from three distinct dialects (Danisi, Eastern Shua, Deti) of the dialect cluster Shua, and from the geographically close language Ts'ixa, focusing on phoneme inventories and phonotactic features. Shua disp...
Southwestern Angola is a region characterized by contact between indigenous foragers and incoming food-producers, involving genetic and cultural exchanges between peoples speaking Kx′a, Khoe-Kwadi and Bantu languages. Although present-day Bantu-speakers share a patrilocal residence pattern and matrilineal principle of clan and group membership, a h...
Languages of the Khoe family have a complex pronominal system that distinguishes three categories each for person, gender, and number. However, while languages of the Khoekhoe branch and the western subgroup of Kalahari Khoe obligatorily or optionally mark nouns and nominal classifiers for gender and number, the nominal marking system in eastern Ka...
Objectives:
Southern Angola is a poorly studied region, inhabited by populations that have been associated with different migratory movements into southern Africa. Apart from Kx'a-speaking San foragers and Bantu-speaking pastoralists, ethnographic and linguistic studies have suggested the existence of an enigmatic array of pre-Bantu communities, l...
Southern Angola is a poorly studied region, inhabited by populations that have been associated with different migratory movements into southern Africa. Besides the long-standing presence of indigenous Kx’a-speaking foragers and the more recent arrival of Bantu-speaking pastoralists, ethnographic and linguistic studies have suggested that other pre-...
Güldemann (1998 and following publications) not only challenged the “Khoisan” family hypothesis established by Greenberg (1950, 1963) and popular among non-specialists ever since, but also proposed the areal concept “Kalahari Basin” comprising the indigenous non-Bantu languages of southern Africa. If the linguistic isoglosses shared by these langua...
Providing a contemporary and comprehensive look at the topical area of areal linguistics, this book looks systematically at different regions of the world whilst presenting a focussed and informed overview of the theory behind research into areal linguistics and language contact. The topicality of areal linguistics is thoroughly documented by a wea...
Accusative alignment has been described a typological feature of the
Khoe-Kwadi language family (Güldemann 2013, 2014). This paper investigates
the complex interplay between pragmatic considerations, clausal
constituent order and morphological marking in the encoding of direct
objects in the Kalahari Khoe language Ts’ixa. [+specific] objects in sin...
Ts’ixa is an endangered language of northern Botswana. It belongs to the Kalahari branch of the Khoe-Kwadi language family and is nowadays spoken by a small community of 200 individuals residing in the village of Mababe, Ngamiland. The internal affiliation of Ts’ixa within Kalahari Khoe is not clear, as the language displays affinities to both the...
Peoples speaking languages of the Bantu family are widespread in sub‐Saharan Africa, from the equatorial rainforest to the Cape of Good Hope. Their present‐day distribution is the result of a remarkable expansion, which started about 4000–5000 years ago in the borderland between Cameroon and Nigeria. The genetic distances among Bantu‐speaking popul...
Objectives:
We investigated the frequency distribution and haplotype diversity of human African trypanosomiasis (HAT) resistance and lactase persistence (LP) variants in populations from the Angolan Namib to trace the spread of these genetic adaptations into southwestern Africa.
Materials and methods:
We resequenced two fragments of the LCT enha...
Phonology of hunting signs in two Kalahari-Khoe speaking groups (Ts'ixa and ||Ani)
