Juǀʼhoan

The more and more I learn about how truly broad the scope of human language is the more and more difficult it gets to surprise me and yet the more and more I find myself surprised.

There is a language spoken in the Kalahari Basin of southern Africa, just on the northern limits of the Kalahari desert itself called Juǀʼhoan (and look closely, that is not the letter “l” after the “u” curiously enough). It is spoken by about 35,000 people and consists of four major dialects. The people who speak it are called the Juǀʼhoansi and their geographic distribution can be found in the following picture which I took from the website whose link is at the very end of this post:

You practically need a degree in linguistics just to be able to fully grasp how complex this language’s phonemic inventory is; it employs the famous African clicks which are everyone's favorite example of strange human speech sounds.

Momentarily putting aside the clicks and just briefly looking at the vowels, there are five main “vowels” that consist of a, e, i, o, and u. (So far so good!) However these five “vowels” really just lay the foundation for a vowel system that English (or any other Indo-European language) speakers have an immensely difficult time comprehending. Juǀʼhoan has four tones in addition to these five “vowels”, and any one of them can be nasalized, glottalized, murmured or different combinations of these. The “vowels” a and o may also be pharyngealized and epiglottalized.

...And suffice it to say, these aggressive and intimidating terms are not just facades that simple concepts lie behind; there are ways of producing human sounds that you just couldn’t dream up, and the sensitivity of the human ear to be able to differentiate these sounds is remarkable.

Getting back to task though, any of these vowels (created by complex combinations of the vowel variations described above) can be long or short as well. All things considered the language has at least 25 or 30 independent vowels depending on how you classify vowels; many would say it has more. This is not counting diphthongs which although constitute vowels, are really nothing more than two simple vowels (or monophthongs) put together.

Just to put things into perspective, the English language we are all so familiar with has about 11-15 vowels depending on the dialect (again not counting diphthongs) and aside from a few peculiarities we do not use any of the distinctions mentioned above.

In terms of consonants we Anglophones have roughly 25 at our disposal. To place us in the grand scheme of things, we have a relatively impressive number of vowels (Spanish for example has just five) and a very average number of consonants.

Getting back to Juǀʼhoan however, its click consonants alone number an astronomical 48, already nearly doubling the entire English consonant system. To make more sense of the number, it stems from the fact that there are four places of articulation for Juǀʼhoan clicks: alveolar, dental, palatal and lateral. There are then 12 different forms of these clicks depending on whether they are nasalized, voiced, aspirated, etc. It does somehow make one feel better about the whole thing that it is a fairly well organized system of 48 clicks as opposed to 48 arbitrary clicks.

Even still, on top of these sounds they have nearly every consonant we have and many more (the notable exception being our proud English th or lisp sound which among the world’s languages is quite rare). Their non-click consonants number well into forties and the whole language of Juǀʼhoan has a total phonemic inventory of over 100 sounds.

Also interesting, Juǀʼhoan is a cousin language of Taa (also commonly written ǃXóõ) which is spoken in the same general region and has the largest number of sounds, estimated at about 112, of any known language used by humans today.

For me this really puts things into perspective when I hear people complaining about the complexity of Spanish conjugations, the seemingly random German word genders, or the mess that is modern French spelling. (Be happy you are not grappling with the phonemic system of Juǀʼhoan!) Yes, it is true that those things in their own right are all very difficult for English speakers, but in terms of linguistic diversity that really just barely scratches the surface of what is out there!

                                                           

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*Side Note* 

Abandoning matters of language, the Juǀʼhoansi people who use the Juǀʼhoan language are notable for their relatively peaceful and non-aggressive behavior. An interesting site which serves to highlight such cultures has an intriguing biography of the people and what makes them a “peaceful society.” If you are at all interested, the bio can be found here:

http://www.peacefulsocieties.org/Society/Juhoan.html