Ju|'hoan Audio & Video Material 1970 to Present: A Work in Progress

Language	Ju|’hoan (ISO639-3:aue), =X’ao-||’aen (ISO639-3:aue)
Depositor	Megan Biesele
Affiliation	Kalahari Peoples Fund
Location	Namibia
Collection ID	0106
Grant ID	FTG0149, MDP0241
Funding Body	ELDP
Collection Status	Collection online
Landing Page Handle	http://hdl.handle.net/2196/5857d8bc-0fb8-4628-8bdc-fc5a06defe2b

 

Summary of the collection

This collection of the Ju|’hoan language, is based on work by Megan Biesele starting in the 1970s. The work has developed into a community-based initiative: the Ju|’hoan Transcription Group (JTG). The collection site was in Namibia, with Ju|’hoan [ktz] at Tsumkwe (Otjozondjupa Region), and closely related =X’ao-||’aen [aue] at Epukiro/Gobabis (Omaheke Region). Estimated speaker numbers at the time of writing [2011] were 11,000 and 4000 respectively.

The collection goals were 1) to gather further recordings/ transcriptions/ translations to extend Ju|’hoan archives at ELAR; 2) to make JTG sustainable, involving younger Ju|’hoan-speakers and scholars; and 3) to carry out PhD research on dialect diversity in the Ju-=Hoan language family, extending understanding of the entire Ju language complex.

 

Group represented

Ju|’hoan San of NW Botswana and NE Namibia.

Estimates of speakers of the endangered Ju|’hoan (ktz) range downward from 33,600 (www.ethnologue.com) to 11,000 (Biesele and Hitchcock, 2011, p. 5), and even this latter estimate may be high. Ju|’hoan is the first language of these former foragers in NE Namibia and adjacent NW Botswana, but its future is threatened. At project site Tsumkwe, Nyae Nyae, Namibia, with 2000 Ju|’hoan, it is still learned at home and precariously holds national educational language status to Grade 4 via the Village Schools Project (VSP) begun by Biesele and linguist Patrick Dickens in 1990. The youth of the other Ju|’hoan in Namibia are losing the language due to economic/political circumstances, though it persists in religious healing. In Botswana, with perhaps 5000 speakers, Ju|’hoan is even less esteemed by children because schooling is exclusively Setswana- and English-medium.

Ju|’hoan increasingly yields to Afrikaans, English, or Setswana in contact contexts. Nevertheless, the language has unparalleled ongoing potential for comprehensive documentation in Nyae Nyae, where the Ju|’hoan have avoided dispossession and fragmentation by creating an internationally recognized land conservancy. Ju|’hoan culture in Nyae Nyae is the most extensively studied in all anthropology, via longterm projects such as HKRP (Harvard KalahariResearch Project), which includes Biesele and, informally, her audio collection. Additionally Ju|’hoan, especially in Nyae Nyae as enabled by HKRP, VSP, and new Namibian commitment to minority radio, is now experiencing community-based revitalization.

Neighboring languages/dialects include (Khoisan): !Xun, Hai||om, Khoe, =X’ao-||’aen, Naro and (Bantu): Otjiherero, SeYei, SeKwanyama.

 

Language information

=X’ao-||’aen [aue], also known as |Auen and Auen, is spoken by about 2000 San in Omaheke province of Namibia and by 2000 San in Ghanzi district in neighbouring Botswana (Cook, 2004). =X’ao-||’aen is a Naro exonym meaning “Northern People”. Community members, however, define themselves as “Ju|’hoan” (true people). Linguists consider Ju a language-complex as there are no clear boundaries between the different dialects. The northernmost varieties are found in Angola. =X’ao-||’aen is the southernmost variety, and thus its documentation is of utmost value to our knowledge of the Ju language-complex. The geographical position of =X’ao-||’aen and the borders it shares with other neighbouring non-Ju San communities lends itself to the study of broader Khoisan language typology. There are points of contact between =X’ao-||’aen and both Taa and Khoe languages; thus =X’ao-||’aen may have very different loan patterns from other southeastern Ju varieties like Ju|’hoan.

 

Special characteristics

Ju|’hoan is cited with other Khoisan languages for the largest inventory of consonants and highest phonetic complexity among world languages. Megan Biesele, who is fluent in Ju|’hoan, spent a total of 12 years with Ju|’hoan people of both Botswana and Namibia since 1970 as ethnographer, folklorist, documentarian, and activist educator. She focuses on the information-intensive, egalitarianism-enforcing, foraging ideology of Ju|’hoan culture that is today undergoing fascinating changes reflected in narrative and political rhetoric. Interest in this topic has grown organically within the Ju|’hoan community as it grappled with recent challenges, assisted by the Kalahari Peoples Fund (KPF) Biesele founded with Harvard colleagues.

 

Collection contents

• Transcriptions
• Lessons
• Video recordings
• Audio recordings
• Dictionary

This collection includes files of type EAF, BAK, DB, MP3, MP4, XLS, ORI, PDF, TXT, WAV, XML. For a full description please see the fully searchable spreadsheet “Biesele ELAR deposit metadata 3-11”, which contains additional metadata. Comments and translations are in English.

Note that transcriptions in ELAN were provided by native speakers in the continuing project, Ju|’hoan Transcription Group (JTG).Moreover, language consultants are co-authors wherever possible, and their expertise fully acknowledged in archives.

 

Collection history

The documentation project of the Ju|’hoan language and culture is the culmination of 41 years of research, audio/video documentation, and language activism by anthropologist Biesele, her, team of Ju|’hoan trainees, and linguistic consultants. It is based in community education in Ju|’hoan literacy begun over 20 years ago by Biesele and the late linguist Patrick Dickens, who provided the orthography, dictionary, grammar, and curriculum materials for the Village Schools Project and its outgrowth, the Ju|’hoan Transcription Group, both of which are in operation today.

The project supported both further field documentation (Tsumkwe, Namibia) and processing (Namibia, US) to extend Biesele’s collection of verbal art, healing narratives, and political negotiation to create an archived and web-disseminated resource for linguistics, anthropology, and the Ju|’hoan people. It aimed to support the making and archiving of field recordings and elicitations in the =X’ao-||’aen areas of Epukiro and Gobabis by Pratchett in both audio and video format, to deliver full phonological analysis and to provide a complete interlinear glossing of the morphology and syntax. This data became a concrete foundation for narratives and their subsequent translations by local people, in parallel with Biesele’s project. Pratchett’s survey of =X’ao-||’aen also included questions of an anthropological nature which explored the speakers’ self-perceptions of their language and of the languages of other communities. Biesele and Pratchett deemed the results of such a survey as essential to a classification of =X’ao-||’aen designed to reflect its speakers.

 

Other information

Funding/sponsoring Agencies: FTGO149; US National Endowment for Humanities; US National Science Foundation; Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research; Firebird Foundation for Anthropological Research; Jutta Vogel Stiftung; Redbush Tea Co. of London; Kalahari Peoples Fund, USA.

Project host organization: Department of Linguistics, University of Texas.

Data was also archived locally at the Namibian government’s Community Learning and Development Center (CLDC)in Tsumkwe, Nyae Nyae. CLDC deposits for the Tsumkwe community are governed by an agreement modeled on that of the Archive of Indigenous Languages of Latin America (AILLA) in Austin, Texas.

The JTG book, Ju|’hoan Folktales: Transcriptions and English Translations, was assessed by the Namibian National Institute for Educational Development for suitability as enrichment materials for the national school system. During 2010 material was assembled toward two more books, one of heroine cycle stories, and one of healing narratives. Each one of the texts for the books was meticulously transcribed, translated, and workshopped by the Ju|’hoan Transcription Group (JTG) for edits and metadata. The transcribers created archives that could be used by scholars such as linguists, and by their own community for heritage and curriculum materials. They sent postings in both Ju|’hoan and English to a new,community-networking website initiated by KPF, called Kalahari Peoples Network (www.kalaharipeoples.net). Between 2002 and 2010, the JTG project’s documentation of ancient lifeways AND the contemporary creativity of young San people have both been well advanced.

 

Acknowledgement and citation

To refer to any data from the collection, please cite as follows:

Biesele, Megan. 2011. Ju|’hoan Audio & Video Material 1970 to Present: A Work in Progress. Endangered Languages Archive. Handle: http://hdl.handle.net/2196/00-0000-0000-000D-089E-3. Accessed on [insert date here].