Ju/'hoan Voices

VOICES OF JU/'HOAN WOMEN AND MEN:
Texts from an Endangered Language

Voices of Ju/'hoan Women and Men is a project funded by the National Endowment of the Humanities and administered by the Shumla School. It is a multiple collaboration between Shumla School President Emeritas Dr. Megan Biesele (a linguist), Dr. Tom Gueldemann of Leipzig University, and native speakers of the Ju/'hoan and !Xuun languages.

Ju/'hoan, considered an endangered language, belongs to the Khoisan languages of southern Africa. These languages are said by linguists to have the largest numbers of consonants and of phonetic categories involving clicks and their accompaniments, making them uniquely complex among the world's languages. Despite the complexity of their languages, the verbal art of Ju/'hoan and other Khoisan-speaking peoples has been embraced as some of the most intriguing and beautiful in the world's repertoire of literature and song. This verbal art is seen by both anthropologists and linguists as key in understanding their culture. Interest in both former hunting and gathering peoples and in peoples who organize their lives orally, rather than scribally, is at an all-time high.

Working with Drs. Biesele and Gueldemann, nonliterate native speakers are generating new texts on tape and offering advice on their linguistic meaning. Four native speakers who are literate in their own languages and in English act as consultant colleagues in orthographic transcription of audiotaped texts, ranging from folklore to contemporary reflections on community, land, and resource issues. They are being trained by the linguist in syntactic interlinearization of texts for professional linguistic use. They will later collaborate with Dr. Biesele in translating the texts into English for publication along with the originals. Additionally, the 19th century linguist Lucy Lloyd's historic texts in !Xuun, allied to Ju/'hoan, is being transposed into a modern orthography and provided with a reconstructed translation and contextualization.

Providing authoritative texts in Ju/'hoan and the closely allied !Xuun, and translating them responsibly into an international language, English, will serve both a wide scholarly audience and the remaining speakers of these languages. Linguists, anthropologists, and the general public will gain vital clues to hunting and gathering lifeways and their relationships to particular environments in southern Africa. Such texts will also form part of a worldwide movement in indigenous communities to preserve and revitalize their languages and traditions.

Finally, the project will have lasting impact on both the indigenous participants and their communities. The training it provides will enable native speakers to contribute to both scholarship about their own language and culture, and to archives of a priceless intellectual heritage.