Nama (aka Khoekhoe) is a language in the Khoisan family spoken by about 200.000 people in Botswana, Namibia and South Africa. Nama belongs to the same family as the Taa language profiled at the end of Chapter 10.
Like Taa, Nama is known to linguists for its remarkable inventory of click consonants. You can listen to these click sounds – and to the Nama language – by visiting the website of linguist Peter Ladefoged, who made recordings with Nama speakers during one of his fieldwork trips to South Africa:
When Ladefoged entered the Nama speech community, he did not know a single word of the Nama language, let alone the meaning of the greetings you just heard. So how do linguists study languages they do not understand?
Rather than learning a language in the way you may have learned a second language as a student, linguists rely on a special set of methods for understanding and describing the languages they investigate. The linguists who conduct this type of research work in a branch of linguistics known as field linguistics, the goal of which is to describe the structures of previously undescribed languages.
Field linguists collect and analyze original linguistic data by working directly with native speakers of target languages. The term field refers to the fact that the linguists tend to spend time living for an extended period of time in the speech communities where native speakers of the target language live.
In speech communities undergoing language shift, many young speakers are bilingual in the local (undescribed) language and a more widely-spoken regional or national language. These speakers are an invaluable resource to field linguists, since they can work as both informants and interpreters. This means that the linguist should be familiar with the lingua franca in the region where the target language is spoken.
Some field linguists actually prefer not to work with bilinguals, who may inadvertently mix their languages without being aware of doing so. In some cases, there are only monolingual speakers of the target language, leaving the field linguist no choice but to use the tools of the trade. In this case, what happens next depends on the research questions at hand.
If the goal is to provide a general description of the language, the first task may be discovering basic vocabulary. Some linguists use word lists, such as the Swadesh list, established by linguist Morris Swadesh, which helps establish vocabulary for body parts (ear, eye, nose, mouth), colors (red, green, yellow, black), and naturalistic elements (tree, seed, leaf, root), among other categories.
To study the sounds of an undocumented language, field linguists begin by making phonetic transcriptions in notebooks. The International Phonetic Alphabet is the best tool for doing this, though other transcriptions systems exist.
Recordings, such as the one you heard of Nama greetings, are invaluable; not only do they allow linguists to double check their written transcriptions, they also allow linguists to study the speech sounds acoustically. In the past, this work had to be done in the linguistics lab, though the development of digital recording equipment and laptop computers means linguists can analyze recordings acoustically from almost anywhere in the world.
To study the morphology and grammar of an undocumented language, field linguists may use questionnaires as guides to help them discover the way the language works – what is the order of constituents? Does the language have a copula verb? How are grammatical complements marked? If there are bilingual speakers, linguists may ask them to translate a text written in the lingua franca into the local, target language.
If there are no bilingual speakers, the linguist may manipulate a word or structure in the target language and ask the native speaker to comment on (or correct) the manipulation. Linguists learn the descriptive rules of the language when the speakers correct the manipulation. Sometimes linguists try and elicit specific grammatical forms by asking the speakers to manipulate a sentence; for instance, how to make an affirmative construction into a negative one, a declarative statement into an interrogative, and so forth.
Visual stimuli – books, images, videos, and role play – can be used to elicit grammatical forms in the target language.
Because many of the world’s undocumented languages are also endangered languages, field linguists are often also concerned with language documentation and revitalization. If a language has only a few remaining speakers, the priority may shift from the elicitation tasks described above to simply recording as much of the language in as many contexts as possible to be studied later.
In situations where revitalization is possible, field linguists are increasingly involved in helping to produce bilingual dictionaries, language teaching materials, and even writing systems, if the language was previously unwritten.
Although the Nama language is not considered immediately endangered, many of the Khoisan languages are, including Taa. The work of field linguists may play an important role in keeping these languages alive.
Linguist K. David Harrison has been very engaged with documenting previously undescribed languages. Watch him in action here.