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LW-013 Tuu · South Africa 2021

Nǁng (Nǀuu)

tuuassimilation2000s
Where
Where
Speakers at peak
Speakers at peak
Last speaker
Few elderly speakers
Status
Dormant

Summary

Nǁng — widely known by the name of its main surviving variety, Nǀuu — is a Tuu language of South Africa's Northern Cape, the ancestral tongue of the ǂKhomani San. It is the last surviving language of the ǃUi branch of the Tuu family (formerly grouped under the misleading label "Southern Khoisan"), its nearest relatives, such as ǂUngkue, already extinct and its only living relative the distant Taa.

The language is famous among linguists for one of the largest sound inventories ever documented: by one count some 45 click sounds together with around 30 non-click consonants and 39 vowels, including rare click types found in almost no other language. This phonological richness makes Nǁng a treasure for the study of human speech — and made its near-silencing a loss felt well beyond the Kalahari.

Nǁng was driven to the brink by the dispossession of San peoples, the dominance of Afrikaans, apartheid-era stigma against San identity, and the scattering of the ǂKhomani community from the lands that are now Kgalagadi Transfrontier Park. Linguists had presumed the language extinct until the late 1990s, when around twenty elderly speakers were located among the ǂKhomani. By then no children were learning it, and the speakers were already old.

Nǁng must not be written off as a language with a single "last speaker" who has died. Its most prominent custodian, Katrina Esau — known as Ouma Geelmeid — has taught the language to children since 2002, helped produce a dictionary and a published reader, and was honored nationally for her work. The death of her brother Simon Sauls in June 2021 left her widely described as the last fully fluent speaker, but the language is being actively taught and reclaimed. It is best understood as critically endangered and dormant in everyday use, not gone.

Profile

Nǁng belongs to the Tuu language family, one of the independent click-language families of southern Africa, and specifically to its ǃUi branch — of which Nǁng is the sole survivor. The older umbrella term "Southern Khoisan" has been abandoned by linguists, who now recognize Tuu as a family in its own right, unrelated by descent to the Khoe and Kxʼa families with which it shares the areal feature of clicks. Within Nǁng, the best-documented variety is Nǀuu, the name by which the language is most often known publicly.

The speakers are the ǂKhomani San of the southern Kalahari, in South Africa's Northern Cape, around the area of the Kgalagadi Transfrontier Park and the town of Upington. For most of the twentieth century outsiders assumed the language and even the community had disappeared. The ǂKhomani had been dispossessed of their land and largely absorbed, on the surface, into Afrikaans-speaking farm labor and coloured identity under apartheid classification.

What draws linguists to Nǁng is its phonology. The language deploys an exceptionally large click inventory across multiple places of articulation — dental, lateral, alveolar, palatal, and the rare bilabial click — combined with a wide range of accompaniments, alongside dozens of non-click consonants and a large vowel system. Documenting it has been a priority for click-language research precisely because it preserves contrasts that have vanished from nearly every other living language.

The Silencing

The silencing of Nǁng was the cumulative work of dispossession and assimilation rather than any single catastrophe. From the colonial period onward, San peoples of the Cape interior were displaced from their land, hunted and persecuted, and pushed into dependency on farms and settlements. The economic and social world that had sustained the language as a community tongue was steadily dismantled.

Under Afrikaans dominance and the racial order of apartheid, San identity carried heavy stigma. Many ǂKhomani people were classified as "coloured," spoke Afrikaans in public, and concealed or set aside their San language and identity to avoid discrimination and to find work. The creation of the Kalahari Gemsbok (now Kgalagadi Transfrontier) Park and other land losses scattered the community, removing them from the places and lifeways bound up with the language and dispersing speakers among Afrikaans-speaking populations.

The result was a near-total collapse of transmission. By the second half of the twentieth century, parents were no longer raising children in Nǁng; the language survived only in the memories of older people who had grown up with it and then spent decades not using it. So complete was the apparent loss that scholars believed the language extinct — until, in the late 1990s, researchers including Anthony Traill made contact with elderly ǂKhomani who still held it. Around twenty such speakers were identified, all of them old, with no younger fluent generation behind them.

The Last Speaker

Nǁng is not a language to be filed under a single dead "last speaker." When linguists relocated it in the late 1990s, roughly twenty elderly ǂKhomani people could still speak or understand it; over the following two decades that number dwindled as the eldest passed away. Among them, Katrina Esau — Ouma Geelmeid, born in 1933 — emerged as both a fluent speaker and the language's most determined teacher. Her brother Simon Sauls, another fluent speaker, died in June 2021, after which Esau was widely described in the press as the last fully fluent speaker of Nǀuu.

But the more important fact is what Esau has done with her knowledge. In 2002, with her granddaughter Claudia Snyman, she opened a small school in a wooden structure outside her home in Rosedale, on the edge of Upington, and began teaching Nǀuu to children of the community. She collaborated with linguists on a dictionary and orthography, and in 2016 a trilingual reader appeared under the title Ouma Geelmeid ke kxʼu ǁxaǁxa Nǀuu ("Ouma Geelmeid teaches Nǀuu"), followed in 2021 by a children's book, ǃQhoi nǀa Tjhoi (Tortoise and Ostrich). In 2014 the President of South Africa awarded her the Order of the Baobab in Silver for her contribution to preserving a language facing extinction.

There is grief here — the long quiet of a language that nearly no one under seventy can speak, the loss of fellow speakers one by one — but it sits alongside something more hopeful. A woman in her nineties has spent more than two decades making sure that children in Upington can greet, count, and name the world around them in the clicks of their ancestors. The chain of fluent speakers has worn perilously thin, but the language is still being taught, still being written down, still being heard.

Legacy

Nǁng survives today as a critically endangered, actively reclaimed language. Far from being treated as lost, it is the focus of ongoing teaching, documentation, and community pride centered on Katrina Esau's school in Rosedale, where children of the ǂKhomani learn the clicks, vocabulary, and greetings of Nǀuu. Esau's recognition with the Order of the Baobab in 2014 brought national attention to that work.

The language now exists in durable written form for the first time. Linguists collaborating with the community developed an orthography and dictionary, and published materials — the 2016 trilingual reader Ouma Geelmeid ke kxʼu ǁxaǁxa Nǀuu and the 2021 children's book ǃQhoi nǀa Tjhoi — give learners and researchers a foundation that did not exist a generation ago. The language's extraordinary click inventory has been documented in detail, securing its scientific record.

Nǁng is most accurately described as dormant in daily use and critically endangered, but living. Its pool of fully fluent elders has shrunk to very few, and the loss of speakers such as Simon Sauls in 2021 is real. Yet a teaching community, a written tradition, and a new generation of young learners mean the language is not simply gone — it is being held onto, deliberately and with care, by the people to whom it belongs.

Lessons

  1. A language presumed extinct by scholars can still be alive in the memories of elders who were never asked.
  2. Stigma — being made ashamed of one's identity — can silence a language as effectively as outright prohibition.
  3. One determined teacher with community support can turn near-extinction into active reclamation.
  4. Documenting a language with a rare sound system preserves scientific knowledge of human speech that exists nowhere else.
  5. Critically endangered is not the same as gone: teaching, writing, and child learners can keep a dormant language in reach.

References