He was also an early describer of Khoisan and Bantu click consonants, devising phonetic symbols for a number of them.

Most of southern Africa was occupied by pygmy peoples and Khoisan who engaged in hunting and gathering.

The Transvaal region was inhabited by the Khoisan for thousands of years, and by iron-age ancestors of modern Bantu-language speaking South Africans, such as the Sotho, Swati, Tswana, Pedi, Venda and Transvaal-Ndebele peoples since the mid 4th century AD.

In the 19th century, a distinguishing feature of Khoisan women was considered to be their tendency for steatopygia.

Sarah Baartman was born to a Khoisan family in the vicinity of the Gamtoos River in what is now the Eastern Cape of South Africa.

Professor Anthony Traill ( 1939 – 2007 ) was a linguist ( specifically a phonetician ), who was the world's foremost authority on a San ( more broadly, a Khoisan ) language called! Xóõ.

It was South Africa's first officially registered motto in a Khoisan language.

The band's name was inspired by the subtitles of the movie The Gods Must Be Crazy, in which the clicking sounds of the Bushmens ' Khoisan language were represented as "!".

Born to a Khoisan family, she was displayed in London in the early 19th century.

Ernst Oswald Johannes Gotthard Gotthilf Westphal ( 1919-1990 ), was a South African linguist and an expert in Bantu and Khoisan languages.

He was Lecturer in Bantu Languages at the School of Oriental and African Studies at the University of London 1949-1962, and Professor of African Languages in the School of African studies at the University of Cape Town, South Africa, from 1962 until his retirement in 1984, and recognized as the world's leading authority on the click languages of the San, the Khoisan languages, in many of which he was almost supernaturally fluent.

! Kung constituted one of the branches of the putative Khoisan language family, and was called Northern Khoisan in that scenario, but the unity of Khoisan has never been demonstrated and is suspected to be spurious.

The Khoisan people of the Kalahari desert in southern Africa say that long ago there were no stars and the night was pitch black.

However, Hadza has very few proposed cognates with either Sandawe or the other Khoisan languages, and many of the ones that have been proposed appear doubtful.

With eighty-one consonants, Ubykh has one of the largest inventories in the world, and probably the largest outside the Khoisan languages.

Against the traditional interpretation that finds a common origin for the Khoi and San, other evidence has suggested that the ancestors of the Khoi peoples ( one subset of the Khoisan ) are relatively recent pre-Bantu agricultural immigrants to southern Africa, who abandoned agriculture as the climate dried and either joined the San as hunter-gatherers or retained pastoralism to become the Khoikhoi.

The authors of these studies suggested that the Khoisan ( actually the San ) may have been one of the first populations to differentiate from the most recent common paternal ancestor of all extant humans, the so-called Y-chromosomal Adam by patrilineal descent, estimated to have lived 60, 000 to 90, 000 years ago.

There are smaller but still significant groups of speakers of Khoisan languages, not included in the eleven official languages, but are one of the eight other officially recognised languages.

Inhabitants of the Caprivi Strip speak a number of African languages: most of them members of the Bantu language family, although there is also at least one language in the northwest of the strip ( on the Namibia / Angola border ) which is a Khoisan language: Hukwe.

The size of click inventories ranges from as few as three ( in Sesotho ) or four ( in Dahalo ), to dozens in the Kx ' a and Tuu ( Northern and Southern Khoisan ) languages.

Greenberg grouped the hundreds of African languages into four families, which he dubbed Afroasiatic, Nilo-Saharan, Niger – Congo, and Khoisan.

The Khoisan languages have pulmonic, ejective, and click consonants, the Chadic languages have pulmonic, implosive, and ejective consonants, and the Nguni languages utilize all four, pulmonic, click, implosive, and ejective, in normal vocabulary.

Some differences are purely personal, while others may be genetically linked ; a striking example of the latter is the elongated labia minora of the Khoisan peoples, whose " khoikhoi aprons " can hang down up to 10 cm ( four inches ) past their labia majora when they are standing.

Clicks occur in all three Khoisan language families of southern Africa, where they may be the most numerous consonants.

The Khoisan languages ( also known as the Khoesan or Khoesaan languages ) are the click languages of Africa which do not belong to other language families.

The putative branches of Khoisan are often considered independent families, in the absence of a demonstration that they are related according to the standard comparative method.

It contains the languages not included in the Niger – Congo, Afroasiatic, or Khoisan families.

The distribution ( green ) of the Khoisan languages | various language families spoken by Khoisan peoples.

Language families which distinguish ejective consonants include all three Caucasian families ( Northwest Caucasian languages, Northeast Caucasian languages and Kartvelian Georgian language ); the Athabaskan, Siouan and Salishan families of North America, along with the many diverse families of the Pacific Northwest from central California to British Columbia ; the Mayan family and Aymara ; the southern varieties of Quechua ( Qusqu-Qullaw ); the Afro-Asiatic family ( notably most of the Cushitic and Omotic languages, Hausa and South Semitic languages like Amharic and Tigrinya ) and a few Nilo-Saharan languages ; Sandawe, Hadza, and the Khoisan families of southern Africa.

Merritt Ruhlen comments that, " At the present time the evidence connecting Indo-Pacific to the world's other language families is sparse, comparable perhaps to the relatively weak links between Khoisan and other families ", but adds that "... there do appear to be some threads connecting Indo-Pacific with the world's other language families, threads that further research can be expected to strengthen.

The Southern African Khoisan languages only utilize root-initial clicks.

Peoples that preserved paleolithic hunting-gathering until the recent past include some indigenous peoples of the Amazonas ( Aché ), some Central and Southern African Bushmen ( Hadza people, Khoisan ), some peoples of New Guinea ( Fayu ), the Mlabri of Thailand and Laos, the Vedda people of Sri Lanka, and a handful of uncontacted peoples.

Certain African languages such as the Khoisan languages use the uvula to produce click consonants as well, though other than that, uvular consonants are fairly uncommon in Sub-Saharan Africa.

Over the generations, the Bushmen of Southern Africa have continued to be absorbed into the African population, particularly the Griqua sub-group, which is an Afrikaans-speaking people of predominantly Khoisan that has certain unique cultural markers which set them apart from other Africans.

Despite the archaic features, these specimens were argued to represent the direct ancestors of modern Homo sapiens sapiens which, according to the " recent African origin ( RAO )" or " out of Africa " model, developed shortly after this period ( Khoisan mitochondrial divergence dated not later than 110, 000 BCE ) in Eastern Africa.

The term originated in reference to medieval French motets, but the technique remains in common use in contemporary music ( Louis Andriessen's Hoketus ), popular music ( funk, stereo panning, the work of Robert Fripp and Adrian Belew in King Crimson ), Indonesian gamelan music ( interlocking patterns shared between two instruments — called imbal in Java and Kotekan in Bali ), Andean siku ( panpipe ) music ( two pipe sets sharing the full number of pitches between them ), handbell music ( tunes being distributed between two or more players ), Rara street processions in Haiti, as well as in the Gaga in the Dominican Republic and many African cultures such as the Ba-Benzélé ( featured on Herbie Hancock's " Watermelon Man ", see Pygmy music ), Mbuti, Basarwa ( Khoisan ), the Gumuz tribe from the Blue Nile Province ( Sudan ), and Gogo ( Tanzania ).

Xun may refer to any of several southern African Khoisan languages

The Khoisan languages are the smallest phylum of African languages.

; several southern African Khoisan languages:

: IV. A South African Khoisan

: IV. A. 1 Northern South African Khoisan

: IV. A. 2 Central South African Khoisan

: IV. A. 3 Southern South African Khoisan