Hadza language


Hadza is a language isolate spoken along the shores of Lake Eyasi in Tanzania by around 1,000 Hadza people, who include in their number the last full-time hunter-gatherers in Africa. It is one of only three languages in East Africa with click consonants. Despite the small number of speakers, language use is vigorous, with most children learning it, but UNESCO categorizes the language as vulnerable.

Name

The Hadza go by several names in the literature. Hadza itself means "human being." Hazabee is the plural, and Hazaphii means "they are men." Hatza and Hatsa are older German spellings. The language is sometimes distinguished as Hazane, "of the Hadza".
Tindiga is from Swahili watindiga "people of the marsh grass" and kitindiga. Kindiga is apparently a form of the same from one of the local Bantu languages, presumably Isanzu. Kangeju is an obsolete German name of unclear origin. Wahi is the German spelling of the Sukuma name for either the Hadza west of the lake, or perhaps a Sukuma clan that traces its ancestry to the Hadza.

Classification

Hadza is a language isolate. It was once classified by many linguists as a Khoisan language, along with its neighbour Sandawe, primarily because they both have click consonants. However, Hadza has very few proposed cognates with either Sandawe or the other putative Khoisan languages, and many of the ones that have been proposed appear doubtful. The links with Sandawe, for example, are Cushitic loan words, whereas the links with southern Africa are so few and so short that they are most likely coincidental. A few words link it with Oropom, which may itself be spurious; the numerals itchâme "one" and piye "two" suggest a connection with Kwʼadza, an extinct language of hunter-gatherers who may have had recently shifted to Cushitic.
Several parallels have been collected with many of the Afroasiatic languages. A lexicostatistical proposal for Hadza as a member of the family, perhaps particularly close to Chadic, was criticized by specialists of Hadza and Cushitic as more likely consisting of several layers of loanwords and some chance resemblances, due to insufficient regularity in sound correspondences and a lack of grammatical evidence for a relationship. George Starostin finds the hypothesis of a relationship of Hadza with Afroasiatic theoretically plausible, but that any demonstration of it by lexical comparison remains "almost by definition impossible", due to the reconstruction of Proto-Afroasiatic being still poorly developed.
There are no dialects, though there is some regional vocabulary, especially Bantu loans, which are more numerous in the southern and western areas of high bilingualism.
The language is marked as "threatened" in Ethnologue.

Phonology

Hadza syllable structure is limited to CV, or CVN if nasal vowels are analyzed as a coda nasal. Vowel-initial syllables do not occur initially, and medially they may be equivalent to /hV/ – at least, no minimal pairs of /h/ vs zero are known.
Hadza is noted for having medial clicks. This distribution is also found in Sandawe and the Nguni Bantu languages, but not in the Khoisan languages of southern Africa. Some of these words are historically derivable from clicks in initial positions, but others are opaque. As in Sandawe, most medial clicks are glottalized, but not all: puche 'a spleen', tanche 'to aim', tacce 'a belt', minca 'to lick one's lips', laqo 'to trip someone', keqhe-na 'slow', penqhenqhe ~ peqeqhe 'to hurry', haqqa-ko 'a stone', shenqe 'to peer over', exekeke 'to listen', naxhi 'to be crowded', khaxxe 'to jump', binxo 'to carry kills under one's belt'.

Tone

Neither lexical tone nor pitch accent has been demonstrated for Hadza. There are no known lexical minimal pairs or grammatical use of stress/tone.

Vowels

Hadza has five vowels,. Long vowels may occur when intervocalic is elided. For example, or 'to climb', but some words are not attested with, as 'she' vs 'to be ill'. All vowels are nasalized before glottalized nasal and voiced nasal clicks, and speakers vary on whether they hear them as nasal vowels or as VN sequences. Invariable nasal vowels, although uncommon, do occur, though not before consonants that have a place of articulation to assimilate to. In such positions, and are allophones, but since VN cannot occur at the end of a word or before a glottal consonant, where only nasal vowels are found, it may be that nasal vowels are allophonic with VN in all positions.

Consonants

Consonants in shaded cells appear only in loanwords or are NC sequences, which do not appear to be single segments but are listed here to illustrate the orthography.
  1. The nasalization of the glottalized nasal clicks is apparent on preceding vowels, but not during the hold of the click itself, which is silent due to simultaneous glottal closure. The labial is found in a single mimetic word where it alternates with.
  2. The labial ejective is only found in a few words.
  3. The palatal affricates may be pronounced with an alveolar onset, but this is not required.
  4. The velar ejective varies between a plosive, a central affricate, a lateral affricate, and a fricative. The other central ejective affricates can surface as ejective fricatives as well.
  5. The lateral approximant is found as a flap between vowels and occasionally elsewhere, especially in rapid speech. is most common post-pausa and in repeated syllables. A lateral flap realization can also occur.
  6. The voiceless velar fricative is known from only a single word, where it alternates with.
  7. and zero onset appear to be allophones. may be allophones of, and what are often transcribed in the literature as next to a back vowel or next to a front vowel are nothing more than transitions between vowels.
  8. The NC sequences only occur in word-initial position in loanwords. The voiced obstruents and nasal consonants and perhaps also seem to have been borrowed.

    Orthography

A practical orthography has been devised by Miller and Anyawire. As of 2015, this orthography is not being used by any Hadza speakers and is therefore of limited value for communication in Hadza. It is broadly similar to the orthographies of neighboring languages such as Swahili, Isanzu, Iraqw, and Sandawe. The apostrophe, which is ubiquitous in transcription in the anthropological literature but causes problems with literacy, is not used: Glottal stop is indicated by vowel sequences, which true vowel sequences are separated by y or w, though in some cases an h may be justified, and ejectives and glottalized clicks by gemination. The ejectives are based on the voiced consonants,, because these are otherwise found mostly in borrowings and thus not common. Tc and tch are as in Sandawe, sl as in Iraqw. Nasalized vowels / VN rimes are. Long vowels are, or where they are due to an elided. A tonic syllable may be written with an acute accent,, but is generally not marked.

Grammar

A grammar of Hadza is given by Miller.
Hadza is a head-marking language in both clauses and noun phrases. Word order is flexible; the default constituent order is VSO, though VOS and fronting to SVO are both very common. The order of determiner, noun, and attributive also varies, though with morphological consequences. There is number and gender agreement on both attributives and verbs.
Reduplication of the initial syllable of a word, usually with tonic accent and a long vowel, is used to indicate 'just' and is quite common. It occurs on both nouns and verbs, and reduplication can be used to emphasize other things, such as the habitual suffix -he- or the pluractional infix .

Nouns and pronouns

Nouns have grammatical gender and number. They are marked by suffixes as follows:
The feminine plural is used for mixed natural gender, as in Hazabee 'the Hadza'. For many animals, the grammatical singular is transnumeric, as in English: dongoko 'zebra'. The masculine plural may trigger vowel harmony: dongobee 'zebras', dungubii 'zebra bucks'. A couple of kin terms and the diminutive suffix -nakwe take -te in the m.sg., which is otherwise unmarked.
Gender is used metaphorically, with ordinarily feminine words made masculine if they are notably thin, and ordinarily masculine words made feminine if they are notably round. Gender also distinguishes such things as vines and their tubers, or berry trees and their berries. Mass nouns tend to be grammatically plural, such as atibii 'water'.
The names reported for dead animals do not follow this pattern. Calling attention to a dead zebra, for example, uses the form hantayii. This is because these forms are not nouns, but imperative verbs; the morphology is clearer in the imperative plural, when addressing more than one person: hantatate, hantâte, hantayetate, hantayitchate.

The copula

The -pe and -pi forms of nouns often seen in the anthropological literature are copular: dongophee 'they are zebras'. The copular suffixes distinguish gender in all persons as well as clusivity in the 1st person. They are:
m.sg.f.sg.f.pl.m.pl
1.ex-nee-neko-'ophee-'uphii
1.in-nee-neko-bebee-bibii
2-tee-teko-tetee-titii
3-a-ako-phee-phii

Forms with high vowels tend to raise preceding mid vowels to high, just as -bii does. The 3.sg copula tends to sound like a -ya or -wa after high and often mid vowels: ≈, and transcriptions with w and y are common in the literature.