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Towards a phonological typology of the Kalahari Basin Area languages

  • Hirosi Nakagawa , Alena Witzlack-Makarevich EMAIL logo , Daniel Auer , Anne-Maria Fehn , Linda Ammann Gerlach , Tom Güldemann , Sylvanus Job , Florian Lionnet , Christfried Naumann , Hitomi Ono and Lee J. Pratchett
Published/Copyright: May 12, 2023

Abstract

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 because the click phonemes carry a high functional load in terms of phonemic and lexical distinctions in the respective systems. Finally, these languages have strikingly similar and highly skewed root phonotactics. The article provides empirical support for a range of claims and speculations that have been made about these typologically rare systems of the Kalahari Basin Area.


Corresponding author: Alena Witzlack-Makarevich [ᴧˈlʲenə ˈvitslək məkᴧˈrevitɕ], Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Jerusalem, Israel, E-mail:

Award Identifier / Grant number: 2892/20

Award Identifier / Grant number: Kakenhi (Grants-in-Aid for Scientific Research) #1

Award Identifier / Grant number: Kakenhi (Grants-in-Aid for Scientific Research) #2

Acknowledgements

The project was funded by the grant Kakenhi (Grants-in-Aid for Scientific Research) of Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS) #16H01925 for 2016–2019 and #20H00011 for 2020–2024. Alena Witzlack-Makarevich gratefully acknowledges the support of the grant no. 2892/20 of the Israel Science Foundation.

  1. Author contributions: All authors designed research, authors contributed to data collection as indicated in Table 1; all authors analyzed data; H. N and A. W.-M. wrote the paper, A. W.-M. carried out data aggregation and visualization.

Appendix

Figure A: 
C1 in the word list dataset.
Figure A:

C1 in the word list dataset.

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Supplementary Material

This article contains supplementary material (https://doi.org/10.1515/lingty-2022-0047).


Received: 2022-07-12
Accepted: 2022-11-02
Published Online: 2023-05-12
Published in Print: 2023-07-26

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