Nǁng (Nǀuu)

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.