Khwe language

Khwe ˈkweɪ (also rendered Kxoe, Khoe ˈkɔɪ) is a dialect continuum of the Khoe family of Namibia, Angola, Botswana, South Africa, and parts of Zambia, with some 8,000 speakers. Khwe is a member of the Khoe language family. The 2000 meeting of the Working Group of Indigenous Minorities in South Africa (WIMSA) produced the Penduka Declaration on the Standardisation of Ju and Khoe Languages, which recommends Khwe be classified as part of the Central Khoe-San family, a cluster language comprising Khwe, ǁAni and Buga. Khwe is the preferred spelling as recommended by the Penduka Declaration, but the language is also referred to as Kxoe, Khoe-dam and Khwedam. Barakwena, Barakwengo and Mbarakwena refer to speakers of the language and are considered pejorative. Other names and spellings of ǁAni include ǀAnda, Gǀanda, Handá, Gani and Tanne with various combinations of -kwe/khwe/khoe and -dam. The Khwe-speaking population has resided around the "bush" in areas of sub-Saharan Africa for several thousand years. Testimonies from living Khwe speakers note that their ancestors have come from the Tsodilo Hills, in the Okavango Delta, where they primarily used hunter-gatherer techniques for subsistence. These testimonies also indicate that living Khwe speakers feel as though they are land-less, and feel as though the governments of Botswana and Namibia have taken their land and rights to it. Until the 1970s, the Khwe speaking population lived in areas that were inaccessible to most Westerners in remote parts of Namibia, Angola, Zambia, Botswana, and South Africa. Since then, livelihoods have shifted from primarily from hunter-gatherer to more Westernized practices. The first Bantu-speaking education that Khwe speakers received was in 1970 at a settlement in Mùtcʼiku, a settlement proximate the Okavango River. Some argue that this put the language in a state of decline, as younger populations learned Bantu languages, such as Tswana. Khwe is learned locally as a second language in Namibia, but the language is being lost in Botswana as speakers shift to Tswana.