Why Does isiXhosa Have Clicks?

A fully updated Chapter 5 of Our Long Walk to Economic Freedom

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Long-haul tourists visiting South Africa are always fascinated by the clicks of isiXhosa. Foreign to their ears, the eighteen click consonants can be grouped into three types: the ‘c’ is a dental click made by the tongue at the front of the mouth, the lateral ‘x’ is made by the tongue at the sides of the mouth, and the alveolar ‘q’ is made by the tip of the tongue on the roof of the mouth.

IsiXhosa is part of the Nguni language group, which also includes Zulu and southern and northern Ndebele. Yet few of these or the other South African vernacular languages have clicks, and those that do use them far less. How did isiXhosa come to use clicks so commonly?

One clue comes from the other languages of southern Africa that also use clicks. Although they are not well known, the Ju|’hoan language, spoken by an estimated 10,000 people in Botswana and Namibia, has 48 clicks, and the Taa language, spoken by only 4,000 speakers in Botswana, has 83. The implication is that those Nguni speakers who acquired clicks – what later became isiXhosa – must have been in close contact with the people who spoke click-heavy languages. As we will see, this integration of people at the southern tip of Africa came at the end of what has become known as the Bantu expansion (or the Bantu migration). It is the largest-known human migration and transformed the demography and economy of central, eastern and southern Africa over the last five thousand years…