User:Eef Gilbert/sandbox

When speaking about the ǂAkhoe Haiǁom as a people, they are traditionally profiled as hunter-gatherers and many aspects of their traditional culture have been preserved, despite the political, economic and linguistic marginalisation of their group. Some characteristical features of their culture include healing trance dances, hunting magic, intensive usage of wild plant and insect food, a unique kinship and naming system, frequent storytelling, and the use of a landscape-term system for spatial orientation.

The ǂAkhoe Haiǁom live in the savannah of northern Namibia, in an area stretching from the edges of Etosha salt pan and the northern white farming areas as far as the Angola border – and perhaps beyond – in the north and Kavango in the east. According to the Ethnologue website there were 48,400 ǂAkhoe Haiǁom speakers in 2006, but as with all figures on people and languages of low reputation this count might not be very reliable.

=Language= When talking about ǂAkhoe Haiǁom as a language it has been proven hard to reach a consensus of what exactly is meant by the term. In the sparsely available material on the subject, ǂAkhoe Haiǁom has been considered a variant of the Khoekhoe language, seen as separate dialects (Haacke et al. 1997), as virtual synonyms of one single variant (Heikinnen, n.d.) or even as a way to denote “a way in which some Haiǁom speak their language in the northern part of Namibia” (Widlock, n.d.). Generally ǂAkhoe Haiǁom is classified as a Central Khoisan language and a member of the Khoekhoegowabdialect continuum.

Grammar
In theory ǂAkhoe Haiǀǀom possesses free word order, with the subject-object-verb order (SOV) being the most dominant preference. In keeping with the typological profile of SOV languages, adjectives, demonstratives and numerals generally precede nouns. Nouns are marked by person-gender-number (PGN) markers. Adjectives, demonstratives and numerals, all agree with their head noun.

Mãa	|ũ-ba	nde-ba?

what	hair-3SGM	this-3SGM

“What colour is this?”

Mãa is an interrogative used freely in Haiǁom, the subject |ũ takes the suffix –ba, which is a PGN marker, denoting the 3rd person singular masculine. The indirect object nde, a demonstrative, follows the noun, and is inflected in concord with the head noun.

Compound structures are highly productive in ǂAkhoe Haiǀǀom and vary widely in the combination of word categories. The possiblities include: noun+noun, noun+adverb or vice versa, noun+adjective or vice versa, adjective+adjective, adjective+adverb or vice versa, adjective+suffix or even multiple combinations of the above.

Phonology
Comparing Heikinnen’s and Widlock’s contribution to ǂAkhoe Haiǁom phonology with the more general and theoretical phonological work of Peter Ladefoged (1996), ǂAkhoe Haiǁom can be said to have 47 phonemes. However, a complete indepth phonological sketch of the language might show other results where the vowels are concerned.

Consonants
There are 34 contrastive manifestations of consonants in ǂAkhoe Haiǁom, 20 of which are produced with an ingressive airstream, a.k.a clicks, and 14 of which are produced with an egressive airstream. Clicks are doubly articulated consonants. Each click consists of one of four primary articulations called influxes and one of three secondary articulations called accompaniments, which can be even further divided. In ǂAkhoe Haiǁom the combination of influxes and accompaniments results in 20 phonemes.

Vowels
ǂAkhoe Haiǁom has a total of 12 vowel phonemes. These can be divided into monoph- and diphtongs, with a further subdivision into oral and nasal pronunciation.

Monophtongs:{{IPA|/i e a o u/ and {{IPA|/ĩ ã ũ/}}.

Diphtongs:{{IPA|/ai au/}} and {{IPA|/ãi ãu/}}.