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ǃOrakobab or Khoemana, also known as Korana, ǃOra, or Griqua, is a moribund Khoe language of South Africa.

Names

"Khoemana" (from khoe 'person' + mana 'language') is more commonly known as either Korana /kɒˈrɑːnə/ korr-AH-nə (also ǃOrakobab, ǃOra, Kora, Koraqua) or Griqua (also Gri , Xri, Xiri, Xirikwa). The name 'Korana' reflects the endonym ǃOra IPA: [ǃoɾa] or ǃGora IPA: [gǃoɾa], referring to the ǃOra people. Sometimes ǃOra is also known as Cape Khoe or Cape Hottentot, though the latter has become considered derogatory. The various names are often treated as different languages (called South Khoekhoe when taken together), but they do not correspond to any actual dialect distinctions, and speakers may use "Korana" and "Griqua" interchangeably. Both names are also used more broadly, for example for the Griqua people. There exist (or existed) several dialects of Khoemana, but the details are unknown.

Phonology

Khoemana is closely related to Khoekhoe, and the sound systems are broadly similar. The strongly aspirated Khoekhoe affricates are simply aspirated plosives in Khoemana. However, Khoemana has an ejective velar affricate, /kxʼʔ/, which is not found in Khoekhoe, and a corresponding series of clicks, /ǀ͡xʼ ǁ͡xʼ ǃ͡xʼ ǂ͡xʼ/. Beach (1938) reported that the Khoekhoe of the time had a velar lateral ejective affricate, , a common realisation or allophone of /kxʼ/ in languages with clicks, and it might be expected that this is true for Khoemana as well. In addition, about half of all lexical words in Khoemana began with a click, compared to a quarter in Khoekhoe.

In Korana, and can be pronounced as and .

• The phoneme can be realized as /c/ before or .
• An intervocalic and are sometimes realized as /β/.
• is stated to be alveolar-postalveolar when not followed by a close front vowel , , or .
• The aspirated phoneme is realized as an affricate sound /ts/ when followed by a close front vowel , , or .
• The aspirated sound can sometimes be realized as . Some Griqua speakers may pronounce as .
• The sound only seldom occurs.
• and can occur syllabically as and .
• The trilled can also be realized as a flapped in some speech.
• Voicing can be very weak in Khoemana in casual speech, so voiced plosives can be hard to distinguish from voiceless plosives.

There are four tones in Khoemana: high (notated with an acute accent), rising (notated with a caron), mid (no accent), and falling (notated with a circumflex).

Population

Reports as to the number of Khoemana speakers are contradictory, but it is clear that it is nearly extinct. It was thought to be extinct until the discovery of four elderly speakers around Bloemfontein and Kimberley. A 2009 report by Don Killian of the University of Helsinki estimated that there were less than 30 speakers at the time. Matthias Brenzinger reported in 2012 that one possible speaker remained, but that she refused to speak the language. The discrepancies could be because the language has multiple dialects and goes by several names, with scholars not always referring to the same population. Khoemana is listed as "critically endangered" in UNESCO's Language Atlas. The loss of this endangered language would have a significant impact on the heritage and culture of Khoemana speakers.

Attestation

Robust Khoemana (before more recent language attrition) is principally recorded in an 1879 notebook by Lucy Lloyd, which contains five short stories; some additional work was done in Ponelis (1975). As of 2009, the EuroBABEL project is searching for remaining speakers.

History

The people and their language first began to attract scholarly attention in the 1660s, coinciding with Dutch colonial efforts in the Cape of Good Hope and the resulting armed conflicts. At the time, Khoemana was widely spoken throughout the coastal regions of South Africa. After years of attrition during the colonial era to the 1930s, and under apartheid from 1948 to 1994, the language has all but vanished. Currently, speakers of Khoemana are not only scarce but scattered, due to forced migrations during the apartheid era. This has rendered the language particularly vulnerable.

Notes

1. The -kwa is also a grammatical suffix. The letter "g" for the sound [x] reflects Afrikaans orthography
2. The -na is a grammatical suffix
3. An ejective velar "scrape" followed by a glottal stop, a bit different from a typical velar ejective affricate

References

1. "Khoemana". UNESCO Atlas of the World's Languages in danger. UNESCO. Retrieved 17 March 2018.
2. Khoemana at Ethnologue (25th ed., 2022)
3. ^ Killian, D. Khoemana and the Griqua
4. D. Beach, 1938. The Phonetics of the Hottentot Language. Cambridge.
5. Du Plessis, Menan (2011) "Collection of sound files for inclusion in a dictionary of Korana and eventual integration with a corpus of heritage texts"
6. "Did you know Korana is critically endangered?". Endangered Languages. Retrieved 8 October 2024.
7. UNESCO Xiri at UNESCO Atlas of the World's Languages in Danger
8. Brenzinger, Matthias (2007). Language Endangerment in Southern and Eastern Africa. Berlin, Germany. pp. 179–204. ISBN 9783110170498.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link)
9. Ponelis, F. A. (1975). "ǃOra Clicks: Problems and Speculations." Bushman and Hottentot Linguistic Studies, pp 51–60. ed. Anthony Traill. Communications from the African Studies Institute, no 2. University of the Witwatersrand. Johannesburg.
10. Erasmus, P. Dreams and Visions in Koranna and Griqua Revival in Colonial and Post-Apartheid South Africa

Further reading

• Besten, Michael Paul (2006). Transformation and reconstitution of Khoe-San identities: AAS le Fleur I, Griqua identities and post-apartheid Khoe-San revivalism (1894–2004) (PDF) (Thesis). Faculty of Arts, Leiden University.
• Halford, Samuel James (1949). The Griquas of Griqualand: A Historical Narrative of the Griqua People, Their Rise, Progress and Decline. Juta. OCLC 4379924.
• Killian, Don (2008). Khoemana and the Griqua (Thesis). hdl:10138/33876.
• Jenkins, Trefor (1975). "The Griqua of Campbell, Cape Province, South Africa". American Journal of Physical Anthropology. 43 (1). Wiley Online Library: 71–78. doi:10.1002/ajpa.1330430111. PMID 1155593.
• Robertshaw, PT (1978). "The origin of pastoralism in the Cape". South African Historical Journal. 10. Taylor & Francis: 117–133. doi:10.1080/02582477808671538.
• The Rosetta Project (2010). The Swadesh List.
• Waldman, Linda (2006). "Klaar Gesnap As Kleurling: The Attempted Making and Remaking of the Griqua People". African Studies. 65 (2). Routledge: 175–200. doi:10.1080/00020180601035633. S2CID 144687031.
• Voßen, Rainer (1997). Die Khoe-Sprachen: Ein Beitrag zur Erforschung der Sprachgeschichte Afrikas. (Quellen zur Khoisan-Forschung/Research in Khoisan Studies, 12.). Köln: Cologne: Rüdiger Köppe. pp. 92–94.
• Maingard, L.F. 1962. Korana Folktales. Grammar and Texts. Johannesburg: Witwatersrand University Press

External links

• ǃKorana grammar at Cornell at the Wayback Machine (archive index)
• ǃKorana basic lexicon at the Global Lexicostatistical Database
• ELAR archive of Dictionary of Korana ('Ora)
• Rosetta Project: Xiri Swadesh List

• Khoe languages
• Griqua people
• Languages of South Africa
• Languages of Namibia
• Endangered languages of Africa