User:GauchoMartin/sandbox

Xiri is a language spoken by the Griqua, an indigenous culture native to South Africa and parts of Namabia. It is a click language that belongs to the Khoe family of languages, and is linguistically similar to Nama. Although reports as to the number of speakers are mixed, it is clear that Xiri is a nearly (if not completely) extinct language. A 2009 report by Don Killian of the University of Helsinki estimated that there were less than 30 speakers alive at the time it was written. A seperate paper written by Alena Witzlack-Makarevich for the University of Leipzig in 2006 refers to Xiri as "a now extinct language closely related to Nama," suggesting that it may have completely died out. This confusion could possibly be attributed to the fact that the language has multiple dialects and goes by at least eight different names, with scholars seeming to disagree on whether or not these dialects constitute a single unified language. Xiri is classified as a "Critically endangered" language in UNESCO's Language Atlas. Other names of for Xiri include Khiri, Grikwa, Griqua, Xrikwa, Xirikwa, and Cape Hottentot.

General information
The griqua people, along with the Xiri language, first began to attract widespread attention from scholars around the 1660s, coinciding with both the Dutch colonial efforts in the Cape of Good Hope and the resulting armed conflicts. At the time, Xiri was a widely spoken language throughout the coastal reigions of South Africa. However, after years of attrition suffered from the Dutch Colonial Era through the 1930s, and aparheid from 1948 to 1994, it has all but vanished from the global language pool. Currently, speakers of Xiri are not only scarce but scattered due to forced migrations during the apartheid era. This has rendered the language particularly vulnerable.