Namibia’s “Khoekhoe” language – one of the famous African ‘clicking’ languages

Here’s a video of a native Khoekhoe speaker demonstrating some basic Khoekhoe vocabulary. Khoekhoe, also known as Nàmá, is a language natively spoken by around 200,000 people in the southern African nation of Namibia.

As well as being a tonal language, Khoekhoe is also characterized by its use of ‘clicks’, or doubly articulated consonants, a familiar property of languages in the Khoisan language family. There are several other African languages that share this ‘click’ quality, foremost among them the Zulu language, which is spoken by around 10 million people.

You can find out more about Khoekhoe by looking at its entry in the multitree database.