Inheritance and contact in a language complex: the case of Taa varieties (Tuu family)

The EuroBABEL Taa project (http://www2.hu-berlin.de/asaf/Afrika/Forschung-EN/Taa_varieties.html), a continuation of an earlier DOBES project (http://www.mpi.nl/DOBES/projects/taa), is engaged in the documentation of the Taa dialect continuum. Prof. Tom Güldemann and Dr. Christfried Naumann, based in the Department of African Studies of the Humboldt-Universit?t zu Berlin, are the main investigators on the project. The Taa language complex is the only surviving member of the Tuu family (formerly "Southern Khoisan") with a substantial number of speakers. It is a large cluster of dialects spoken by small bands of former hunter-gatherers (commonly referred to as "San") and stretching geographically from east-central Namibia from the Nossob River over the former Aminuis reserve into the Ghanzi and Kgalagadi Districts of Botswana up to a line Okwa-Tsetseng-Dutlwe-Werda. Mutual intelligibility usually exists between neighboring varieties, but differences between geographically remote dialects can amount to a linguistic distance found between languages. According to the presently available data the Taa complex seems to fall into two major units, namely West !Xoon (spoken exclusively in Namibia) vs. the rest comprising all other varieties, from 'N|ohan (spoken on both sides of the Namibia-Botswana border) to East !Xoon (the easternmost Taa dialect in Botswana). Today West !Xoon and 'N|ohan are no longer separated geographically and socially because both speech communities have been pushed constantly towards the Botswana border and now intermingle there. The Taa project is part of the larger Kalahari Basin area project (KBA; www2.hu-berlin.de/kba/), of which Prof. Güldemann is the project leader and Dr. Robyn Loughnane is the project administrator and researcher. The KBA project is a group of linguists and social and molecular anthropologists working together on questions regarding the population history of non-Bantu-speaking peoples in southern Africa, otherwise known as 'Khoisan'. Although Khoisan is regarded by some as a single language family, the KBA will investigate the hypothesis that the various language families in this area share traits due to extensive contact. The languages and culture of the people in the Kalahari Basin are rapidly dying out, thus the project additionally aims to conduct as much linguistic and anthropological documentation as possible before it is too late. The KBA project is made up of six project teams of scientists based at six different institutions and is funded by EuroBABEL programme of the European Science Foundation and various other country-specific funding bodies. General administration and work on a cross-linguistic database for the project is based in the Department of African Studies of the Humboldt-Universit?t zu Berlin.