Overview

Seen from the perspective of linguistic prehistory, Africa’s place as the homeland of our species makes it also the prime candidate for where our distinctive language capacity first developed. For whenever precisely that occurred, it was while anatomically modern humans were still limited to Africa, or extended at most just to neighbouring regions of Western Asia. It was the most recent “out of Africa” dispersal, then, of behaviourally modern and speaking Homo sapiens, that by definition shaped the very first expansion of our languages. The patterns and sequences of human dispersal must in principle have had corresponding impacts on the divergence and diversity of our languages too. Unfortunately, it is in the nature of language, and its propensity to change at a relatively rapid rate, that almost nothing specific can now be recovered or reconstructed about our languages at such time-depths (for further discussion, see Chapter 1.3, pp. 24–9). Within the limits of what we can reliably tell – i.e. about more recent periods – we begin here with a sketch of the linguistic panorama of Africa at the broadest level.

Conspicuous within this panorama are a small number of surviving African languages marked by what is, by the standards of the rest of the globe, one of the most striking and unusual features found in human speech. Click sounds are used in normal speech almost nowhere else in the world but in the south of Africa (especially among the San and Khoi) and in small pockets in Tanzania and Kenya. In these most distinctive of sounds, and the particular and splintered distribution of languages that use them, some have seen hints of possible continuity from the very distant linguistic past, together with correlations with deep genetic and cultural traits.