Tone in Fwe

This paper describes the use of tone in Fwe, a little-studied Bantu language (K.402) spoken in Zambia and Namibia. Fwe has two underlying tones, and their surface realization is determined by a number of tone rules, such as Meeussen’s Rule, high tone shift and the realization of high tones as falling. Tone also interacts with prosodic lengthening, which affects the penultimate syllable of a phrase-final word, and phonological lengthening, which affects syllables with a glide or followed by a prenasalized consonant

Click adoption and insertion in Xhosa : revisiting the role of hlonipha

Extensive contact with neighboring Khoisan-speaking communities has resulted in the adoption of clicks in Xhosa. Click phonemes occur in Khoisan loanwords, but also in words of Xhosa origin, where an original non-click consonant was substituted by a click. This process was apparently not conditioned by phonological factors, and has been explained as the result of hlonipha. Hlonipha, or isihlonipho sabafazi, is a sociolinguistic practice which requires married women to avoid the names of their in-laws as well as phonologically similar words. Click insertion would have been one way to render taboo words acceptable. In this talk, I re-evaluate the role of clicks in the hlonipha vocabulary. I make use of a corpus of +-1000 hlonipha substitutes for regular Xhosa words, drawn from four sources spanning almost a century of Xhosa usage. The data show that Xhosa wives use a wide variety of highly inventive linguistic strategies to coin new lexemes, but that consonant substitution, especially with clicks, plays an extremely marginal role

Neglected functions of the Bantu applicative in relation to locations : new insights from Fwe (K402)

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Avoidance registers and language contact in Southern Africa

A presentation at the 2020 Colloquium of African Languages and Linguistics, hosted at Leiden University

Prehistoric Bantu-Khoisan language contact

International audienc