Knowledge Bank

The Zulu language of eastern South Africa is remarkable both for being one of the few languages known to have incorporated lingual-ingressive “click” sounds into its phonology through language contact, and for the unusually thorough and comprehensive nature of this incorporation, which has been noted by scholars at least since the 19th century (Döhne 1857). To help explain this, Herbert (1990a) proposes that isihlonipho, a sociolinguistic avoidance custom which the Zulu people have in common with neighboring Bantu peoples, played a decisive role in the integration of clicks into these languages. To date, however, the question of the structure of the click inventories which this integration produced – that is, why Bantu “click languages” utilize certain clicks and not others – has not been addressed. This is particularly worthy of consideration in light of the fact that these Bantu click inventories do not resemble phonetically the click inventories of the southern African non-Bantu (SANB) languages from which they are supposed to have “borrowed” their clicks (Beach 1938:82-88). This thesis takes up the question of the Zulu click inventory’s structure through a consideration of the synchronic processes, isihlonipho and word borrowing, which are believed to have historically contributed to the integration of clicks into Zulu. I conclude that the Zulu click inventory should be seen as emergent within Zulu from the parallel operation of these processes, and not as “borrowed” as one unit from SANB languages. I also propose a new characterization of the isihlonipho process counter to its traditional analysis as “consonant replacement,” and discuss the implications of this study for the understanding of isihlonipho as a historical phenomenon.