Bantu-Khoisan Contact in Southern Africa

Before the arrival of Bantu languages, southern Africa was dominated by speakers of Khoisan languages, a group of three unrelated language families that share the typologically highly unusual feature of using click phonemes. While nowadays Khoisan languages are severely endangered, earlier contacts between Bantu speakers and speakers of Khoisan languages must have been fairly extensive and have led to lexical, phonological and morphological changes. This paper aims at investigating the extent of Khoisan influence in various southern African Bantu languages and at reconstructing the different sociocultural contact situations in which these changes arose.