Sekele dialect

Last updated
Sekele
Northern ǃKung
ǃʼOǃKung
Native to Namibia, Angola
Region Okavango and Ovamboland Territory
Kx'a
Language codes
ISO 639-3 vaj
Glottolog oung1238 [1]

Sekele is the northern variety of the !Kung dialect continuum. It was widespread in southern Angola before the civil war, [2] but now is principally spoken among a diaspora in northern Namibia.

Contents

Sekele goes by a number of names. "Sekele" itself derives from Vasekele, the Angolan Bantu name. It is also known as Northern !Kung (or equivalently "Northern ǃXuun", "Northern Ju" and several other variants) and by the outdated term ǃʼOǃKung (or ǃʼO ǃuŋ [ǃˀoːǃʰũ] , "Forest ǃKung"), and in one source as "Maligo" (short for "Sekele Maligo", denoting a regional variety in Angola).

A dialect of Sekele currently being investigated by linguists has been labeled Mangetti Dune !Kung, and is spoken by a resettled diaspora community of 500–1000 in Namibia and South Africa in the settlements of Mangetti Dune and Omtaku (Omatako?), east of Grootfontein, Namibia, halfway to the Botswana border; and in Schmidtsdrif, west of Kimberley, South Africa.

Phonology

Mangetti Dune !Kung has clicks with four places of articulation, /ǃ ǀ ǁ ǂ/. (A reported distinction between dental lateral and postalveolar lateral clicks has not been confirmed by further research.)

These come in the same eight series as in Grootfontein !Kung, here represented with the palatal articulation:

Lingual /ǂ ǂʰ ᶢǂ ᵑǂ ᵑ̊ǂʰ/
glottalized /ᵑ̊ǂˀ/
linguo-pulmonic /ǂχ/
linguo-glottalic /ǂ͡kxʼ/

Footnotes

  1. ↑ Hammarström, Harald; Forkel, Robert; Haspelmath, Martin, eds. (2017). "!O!ung". Glottolog 3.0 . Jena, Germany: Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History.
  2. ↑ Gordon Jr. & Grimes 2005

References

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