International Summer School on
Language Documentation and Description

School of Oriental and African Studies, London

22 June - 3 July 2009

Documenting concepts in contact

Matthias Branzinger

The lexicon and categories of each language are based on and reflect a certain conceptualisation of the world. Concepts of the world among individuals and communities change continuously with changing fashions of explaining and understanding the social and physical environment. ÒGlobally dominantÓ concepts are increasingly channelled by being spread through rather uniform government-run educational systems (with concepts mostly from scientific frameworks), or through religious mission work (with concepts from various belief systems). Concepts that reflect autonomous traditional views of marginalized cultures are rapidly replaced by globally dominant concepts and these changes result in a qualitative loss of conceptual diversity.

Khwe is a Central Khoisan language spoken by several thousands of former hunter-gatherers in Southern Africa. Despite omnipresent external influences and resulting changes, the Khwe language - as spoken by the older generation - still retains some underlying hunter-gatherer concepts. Their worldview reveals a high appreciation of and respect for individuals and entities, no matter if these are humans, animals, plans or even inanimate objects. While their ethnic tongue is still the everyday medium of communication in most Khwe communities, genuine concepts underlying their heritage language are fading out.

Communication in small scale, highly mobile hunter-gatherer communities results in certain communication strategies and communication needs. Among hunter-gatherers, communication takes place exclusively in face-to face interaction and among people who share a similar social, spiritual and physical environment. Hunter-gatherers exchange information on survival matters, such as the availability and location of bush-food (meat, honey, and edible plants), the threats from intruders or harmful animals, or the prevention or countering of life-dominating supernatural powers.

This paper will analyse some such hunter-gatherersÕ concepts and their present decline in a few selected domains. The ongoing transformations in the Khwe community caused by changing living conditions and contact require a usage-based approach. The present-day variation in Khwe language use allows for analysing semantic shifts, for example in spatial language, and furthermore even reveals diachronic channels in the evolution of strategies of spatial orientation. Marginalization and globalization are threatening language and conceptual diversity on the African continent today, both the loss of minority languages because of the spread of dominant African languages by the former, and the loss of conceptual diversity due to the influence of a spreading world culture by the latter. Description of Khwe hunter-gatherer concepts will soon no longer be possible, when the Khwe elders pass away.