Kxʼa languages


The Kxʼa languages, also called Ju–ǂHoan, are a language family established in 2010 linking the ǂʼAmkoe language with the ǃKung dialect cluster, a relationship that had been suspected for a decade. Along with the Tuu languages and Khoe languages, they are one of three language families indigenous to southern Africa, which are typologically similar due to areal effects.

Languages

ǂʼAmkoe had previously been lumped in with the Tuu languages, perhaps over confusion with the dialect name ǂHȍȁn, but the only thing they have in common are typological features such as their bilabial clicks.
Honken & Heine coined the term Kxʼa for the family as a replacement for the rather inaccessible compound Ju–ǂHoan, after the word 'earth, ground', which is shared by the two branches of the family, though also by neighboring languages such as Kwadi.

Reconstruction

Honken & Heine reconstruct six places of click articulation for Proto-Kxʼa: the five coronal places that occur in Central
ǃKung, plus the bilabial clicks of ǂʼAmkoe. They postulate that the ancestral bilabial clicks became dental in ǃKung. However, Starostin argues that the bilabial clicks are a secondary development in ǂʼAmkoe. He cites the ǂʼAmkoe words for 'one' and 'two', and, where no other Khoisan language has a labial consonant of any kind in its words for these numerals.
Sands notes that ǂʼAmkoe bilabial clicks correspond to all clicks places in ǃKung except for palatal. She postulates that these reflect labialized clicks in Proto-Kxʼa:. These became bilabial in ǂʼAmkoe, while the only traces of the labialization in ǃKung are diphthongs. An example, from Proto-Kxʼa *‼ʷ, is 'tail' in ǂHoan, Juǀʼhoan and Ekoka The lack of is not surprising, given the relative rarity of labiovelarized palatals crosslinguistically.