Documentation for the revitalisation of N|uu

Language	N|uu
Depositor	Sheena Shah
Affiliation	SOAS University of London
Location	South Africa
Collection ID	0505
Grant ID
Funding Body
Collection Status	Collection online
Landing Page Handle	http://hdl.handle.net/2196/90c565ba-170e-4784-a1a3-1225cb9d1ea4

 

Showreel

Summary of the collection

The collection contains audio and video recordings primarily of Katrina Esau, the last mother tongue speaker of the Nǀuu language. Between 2012 and 2016, at the request of the community, linguists from the Centre for African Language Diversity (CALDi) at the University of Cape Town were involved in documenting the Nǀuu language for revitalisation purposes, and specifically in producing learning and teaching materials to support Katrina in teaching the language at her school, Staar na die Sterre (‘Gazing at the Stars’).

The collection contains audio recordings of selected content from the 160-page Nǀuu reader which was produced by the CALDi team in collaboration with community members and which is currently in use at Katrina’s school. These materials include audio recordings (and corresponding time-aligned transcription files) of the speech sounds of Nǀuu, as well as words, phrases and sentences from one of the chapters of the reader.

The collection also contains video recordings of Katrina and her students, including a recording in which Katrina gives her linguistic autobiography.

For more information on the Nǀuu project, see https://www.sheenashah.co.uk/nuu.

 

Group represented

Nǀuu was spoken by members of the ǂKhomani community. As of April 2025, only one mother tongue speaker remains. Nǁng, of which Nǀuu is the last surviving regional variety, was thought to be extinct by expert linguists for several decades (Traill 1995). In the late 1990s, about 20 elderly speakers came forward and revealed their competence in the language. Since then, all but Katrina Esau have passed away.

 

Language information

Nǀuu, spoken in the Northern Cape Province of South Africa, is the last surviving language of the !Ui branch of the Tuu language family. Speakers of Nǀuu, along with those of other now-extinct !Ui languages, such as ǀXam, ǂUngkue and ǁXegwi, were mainly hunter-gatherers who were once spread across much of what is now South Africa.

 

Collection contents

At the request of ǂKhomani community members, language teaching materials were developed for Katrina Esau’s Nǀuu language school. These materials include illustrated alphabet charts, language posters, and an illustrated trilingual reader (Nǀuu, Afrikaans, English), available as a free download: https://open.uct.ac.za/handle/11427/17432). The contents, structure, and format of the reader are tailored to the community’s needs in teaching Nǀuu. Its twelve chapters introduce various semantic fields—such as greetings, body parts, kinship terms, and animal names—and also include games, prayers, and songs. A glossary at the end of the reader provides a list of over 600 Nǀuu terms, accompanied by their Afrikaans and English translations, which are used by Katrina in her language classes. All materials have been produced using the Nǀuu community orthography.

The collection includes selected audio and video recordings generated as part of the project. Time-aligned transcriptions are provided for all audio files.

 

Collection history

The data for this collection was collected between 2012 and 2016 as part of a project undertaken by members of the Centre for African Language Diversity (CALDi) at the University of Cape Town. The two principal investigators of this project were Sheena Shah and Matthias Brenzinger.

 

Acknowledgement and citation

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

Shah, Sheena. 2018. Documentation for the revitalisation of N|uu. Endangered Languages Archive. Handle: http://hdl.handle.net/2196/00-0000-0000-0010-D127-2. Accessed on [insert date here].