How many clicks in Xhosa?
March 11th, 2007A while back I happened to meet a couple people who spoke Xhosa (at a Starbucks, heh). So as is my wont I talked them into teaching me a couple phrases… the only one I was able to remember was Hamba kahle, which means something like “au revoir” or “goodbye” or something.
On a lark I stuck “Xhosa” and “Isixhosa” (which is Xhosa for Xhosa, heh) into Youtube’s search engine, and I found a couple of videos that are interesting to compare.
Now, Xhosa is well known for being a click language. If you’ve never heard such a language you will upon watching these videos, it’s neat to hear.
The first is a tourist guide:
The second is a news report, considerably longer:
The thing that stands out for me is how there are far more clicks in the tour guide’s speech than what you hear in the news report. I imagine that he chose something that’s more or less a “tongue twister”, because it’s fun for the tourists to hear all the clicks.
But judging by how many clicks you hear on average in the news report (far fewer), it seems that this gives an incorrect impression of what the language really sounds like.
An additional bit of evidence for this is the fact that a commenter on Youtube says that the tour guide had used just the same phrase on a previous tour — it probably wasn’t just run of the mill speech.
But whatever, cool to hear.