Bantu languages are Africa’s largest language family, found in virtually all areas of Africa below the
equator. In southern Africa, however, small groups remain that speak languages of a very different
family, the so-called “click” languages, which are referred to as Khoisan languages. These are
spoken by southern Africa’s first populations, who came into contact with speakers of Bantu
languages when they arrived in southern Africa some 2,000 years ago. This contact with speakers
of radically different languages caused the languages of the migrating Bantu speakers to change,
by adopting words, sounds, and grammatical patterns from Khoisan languages. As it is well known
that the kind of language change that takes place in contact situations is determined by its social
circumstances, we can study the social settings of past contact situations by looking at the
linguistic traces that are preserved in the languages of today. These results from linguistics can be
combined with insights from research in molecular anthropology, which studies population
histories by looking at DNA of modern individuals. These have already shown that historically, men
of Bantu ancestry married women with a Khoisan background, but that the integration of Khoisan
men into Bantu societies was much more rare. This project will add insights from the field of
linguistics to these findings, in order to understand how migrating Bantu speakers and resident
Khoisan speakers interacted in southern Africa.