Hadza

Hadza
Autoglottonym:	Haza, hazane
Pronunciation:	[ɦad͜za]
Ethnologue name:	Hadza
OLAC name:	Hadza
Location point:	3°45′ S, 35°10′ E
Genealogy
Family:	isolate
Genus:	Hadza
Speakers
Country:	Tanzania
Official in:	none
Speakers:	1,000
Writing system:	none
Codes
ISO 639-3:	hts

Hadza is a language isolate of Tanzania.

Location and Speakers

Hadza is spoken along the entire eastern shore of Lake Eyasi, at the base of the Serengeti Plateau in Tanzania, from Mount Oldeani in the north to the Isanzu agricultural areas in the south.

There is a small population of Hadza to the west of the lake, in Dunduina 'Sukumaland', but their number seems to be decreasing and many of them only speak Sukuma and Swahili.

There are approximately 1,000 speakers of Hadza, most now bilingual in Swahili. Other second languages include Isanzu in the south, Sukuma in the west, and to a lesser degree Datooga in the center (e.g. near the Yaeda Valley) and Iraqw on the margins of Iraqw territory. The northern Hadza area, around the town of Mangola, was largely monolingual until the introduction of Standard Swahili after independence.

As of 2005, language transmission was robust in the areas east of the lake. About 40% of speakers lived as full-time hunter-gatherers.

Classification

Hadza is a language isolate. Greenberg classified it as Khoisan due to its use of click consonants. If it were not for the clicks, it's likely that Hadza would have been classified as Cushitic.

Dialects

There do not appear to be any dialects of Hadza, presumably due to the mobility of its speakers. There are some regional differences of vocabulary, however, and speakers note that there are many more Bantu loans in the south.

Name

"Hadza" is the most common name in the literature. It simply means 'human being'. The derivative "Hadzane" (in the manner of the people) is sometimes encountered as the name of the language. The feminine plural "Hadzabe'e" may be used for the people, though it is commonly spelled "Hadzabe" due to devoicing of the final vowel. (The feminine is the inclusive gender in the plural.) "Hadzapi", or more accurately hadzaphi'i, is the masculine copular form. "Hatza" and "Hatsa" are older German spellings.

"Tindiga" is from the Swahili name, watindiga 'people of the marsh grass', presumably named for the large spring in Mangola. The name wahadza ~ kihadza is now often found in Swahili publications, but the Hadza do not consider watindiga to be pejorative. "Kindiga" may be a cognate from one of the local Bantu languages. "Kangeju" (pronounced Kangeyu) is an obsolete German name of unclear origin. The name "Wahi" (pronounced Vahi) in Kohl-Larsen is a Sukuma name for the Hadza.

Phonology

Hadza syllable structure is limited to CVN. There are no vowel-initial roots, unless h is analyzed as an allophone of zero. Syllable-coda N surfaces as a homorganic nasal when a following consonant has a place of articulation to assimilate to, and as nasalization of the vowel before a glottal consonant (glottal stop and h/zero) and pre-pausa. Coda N appears allophonically before voiced or glottalized nasal clicks. Moraic (syllabic?) N is also found word-initially in loans, where it may have a different pitch than the following vowel; such nasals are analyzed here as NCV sequences rather than as a series of prenasalized consonants. Initial NCV may also occur when the initial hV syllable is elided from an hVCV word where C2 is a glottalized nasal click.

Stress and tone

Salient stress and pitch is not restricted to a particular syllable. There are no known minimal pairs, grammatical or lexical, for stress or tone. Pairs claimed in the literature have turned out to either not be distinct or not be minimal pairs.

Vowels

There are five vowels, which are close to cardinal [a e i o u]. Phonetic nasal vowels, which are not common except before a consonant, are here analyzed as /VN/.

The mid vowels /e, o/ tend to rise when a high vowel, /i, u/, occurs in the following syllable, and may merge with /i, u/ in that position. However, such assimilation tends to be optional, even in suffixed pronouns such as [ʔone̝biʔi] ~ [ʔunibiʔi] 'we' (masculine, inclusive).

/u/ is relatively uncommon except in loans or due to vowel-height assimilation, and does not occur in grammatical morphemes unless the morpheme has a second syllable with vowel /i/.

Consonants

Hadza consonants

		Labial	Denti- alveolar		(Post) alveolar		Palatal	Post- velar		Glottal
					central	lateral		plain	labialized
Click	Aspirated		ᵏǀʰ		ᵏǃʰ	ᵏǁʰ
	Tenuis		ᵏǀ		ᵏǃ	ᵏǁ
	Voiced nasal		ᵑǀ		ᵑǃ	ᵑǁ
	Glottalized nasal		ᵑǀˀ		ᵑǃˀ	ᵑǁˀ
Plosive / affricate
	Ejective	pʼ	t͜sʼ		t͜ʃʼ	c͜ʎ̥˔ʼ		k͜xʼ	k͜xʷʼ
	Aspirated	pʰ	tʰ	t͜sʰ	t͜ʃʰ	c͜ʎ̥˔ʰ		kʰ	kʷʰ
	Tenuis	p	t	t͜s	t͜ʃ	c͜ʎ̥˔		k	kʷ	ʔ
	Voiced	b	(d)	(d͜z)	(d͜ʒ)			(ɡ)	(ɡʷ)
Nasal		m	n			(ɲ)		(ŋ)	(ŋʷ)
Fricative		(fʷ)	ɬ	s	ʃ
Approximant			ɺ				j		w	ɦ

Consonants in parentheses are thought to be loans, though the voiced obstruents at least are well-integrated and may be spreading to native roots.

Consonants with a grey background may follow a coda nasal. (That is, they may be C2 in a CVNCV pattern.) /ᵏǃ/ and /ᵏǁ/ are not attested in this position, but it is suspected these are accidental gaps, given that only two roots are known with /ᵏǀ/ after a nasal and that the gaps have not yet been investigated in the field.

The voice-onset time of consonants is reduced after a nasal coda: tenuis consonants may be partially or completely voiced, and the aspiration of aspirated consonants may be reduced or lost. This is true of clicks as well as of plosives and affricates. A /b/~/p/ distinction has not been found in this position despite /b/ being native.

The glottalized nasal clicks surface as e.g. [ǃʔ] post-pausa and often [ŋ͡nʔǃ] intervocalically. Accounts differ as to whether there is voiceless nasal airflow in post-pausa position.

Aspirated clicks may have a delayed and clearly audible posterior release, e.g. [ᵏǃʰ] ~ [ᵏǃkʰ].

The ǃ-clicks tend to be weakly articulated, though, so far as is known, not slapped as has been reported from Sandawe. When intervocalic, /ᵑǃ/ may surface as or nearly as [ŋ͡n]. The ǁ-clicks, on the other hand, are typically quite salient.

Many of the ejectives vary between plosive and affricate realizations. [sʼ, ʃʼ, xʼ, xʷʼ] have been noted, as well as the lateral realization [k͜ʟ̝̊ʼ] of /k͜xʼ/. /pʼ/ is uncommon.

The post-alveolar or perhaps even palatal affricates (/c͜ʎ̥˔/ etc.) may be pronounced with an alveolar onset, e.g. [t͜ʎ̥˔], but this is not distinctive. The fricative /ɬ/ is pronounced at a different place of articulation. Given that the fricative may be pronounced as an affricate in some prosodic situations, this means that there is an three-way phonetic place contrast among laterals: [t͜ɬ] vs [t͜ʎ̥˔ ~ c͜ʎ̥˔] and [t͜ʎ̥˔ʼ ~ c͜ʎ̥˔ʼ] vs [k͜ʟ̝̊ʼ].

/ɺ/ is typically realized as [l] post-pausa and [ɾ] elsewhere, though [ɺ] is not uncommon. It also tends toward [l] when it occurs as both C1 and C2, as in /ɺoɺa/ (sp. rabbit).

[ɦ] and zero may be allophones. If so, and given that vowel-initial suffixes may elide a stem-final vowel, it would be simplest to posit that the phoneme is zero and [ɦ] an allophone of zero. A predictive conditioning environment has not been discovered, but prosody may play a role; even vowel-initial suffixes and clitics may be realized with an initial [ɦ] when given contrastive prosody. Assimilation or bilingualism may be involved in the case of loanwords. For instance, an Isanzu loan for 'snake' was recorded as /ʔiɦato/ at the beginning of the 20th century (and perhaps in an Isanzu-biligual area) but as /ʔiato/ ~ /ʔijato/ at the beginning of the 21st century in Mangola.

/j/ and /w/ are not distinctive next to front (/i, e/) and back (/o, u/) vowels, respectively. It is possible that they are allophones of /i/ and /u/. When they occur word-initially, purported /jV, wV/ often appear as [ʔijV] and [ʔuwV]. This is true even of a ubiquitous sequential auxiliary (/jamo ~ ʔiamo/ in the 3msg posterior (past?) tense. /j/ does however occur in two object suffixes where such variation has not been noted.

Marginal consonants

A labial click, variously reported as [ᵑʘʷ] or [ᵑʘˀ], is found in a single word that is mimetic for a kiss and often made with an accompanying kiss to the hand. It may be that it is allophonic with a dental click.

A trill [r] is used by some speakers in some words, perhaps reflecting the pronunciation of the word in the language it was borrowed from. It is replaced with /ɺ/ by other speakers.

An implosive [ɓ] is used by some speakers in some words, perhaps reflecting the pronunciation of the word in the source language. It is replaced with /b/ by other speakers. Other implosives have not been noted.

A fricative [x] occurs lexicalized in an expletive, where otherwise the root has /kʰ/. (/kʰ/ is commonly realized as [kx].)

The approximants /j, w/ should perhaps also be considered marginal.