The languages traditionally referred to as the ‘Khoisan’ languages are spoken in Southern and Eastern Africa. They are famous for the extensive use of otherwise very uncommon click phonemes. About a dozen of these languages are still spoken today. The details of the genealogical relatedness of the Khoisan languages have been an issue of on-going debate and ‘Khoisan’ remains a negatively defined entity encompassing indigenous non-Bantu click languages of Southern Africa which cannot all be related genealogically. The state-of-the-art classification suggests five distinct families viz. the two isolates in Eastern Africa, Hadza and Sandawe, and three language families in Southern Africa (Khoe-Kwadi, Kx’a, and Tuu). 

The focus of this project is the Khoe-Kwadi family. Whereas the higher-level classification of the Khoe-Kwadi lineage is widely accepted in Khoisan studies, the classification of individual varieties is far from conclusive. One major open question is the problematic language-dialect distinction among the varieties of the Nama-Damara language complex: For sociolinguistic reasons, they are often lumped under the single standard language Namibian Khoekhoe. Furthermore, there is a substantial gap of descriptive information on the Khoekhoe (or Nama-Damara) varieties going beyond lexical comparison. The goals of the proposed project are to (a) describe a number of peripheral varieties of the Nama-Damara language complex on the basis of archival resources and original data collected during field trips, (b) reevaluate and refine the internal structure of the Nama-Damara language complex on the basis of these descriptions, and (c) shed further light onto the population and linguistic prehistory of the Cape region before colonization and the formation of this linguistic area, as well as (d) on the history of dialect levelling and coinezation under the influence of educational and standard variety.

This project challenges the centrality of pragmatic inferencing as a driving force of language change in modality. I argue that a combination of theoretical and empirical considerations motivate a shift from pragmatic to semantic explanation of change in this domain, providing novel support for recent groundbreaking proposals that were based on diachronic changes observed in other linguistic domains (Beck, 2012; Beck & Gergel, 2015; Condoravdi & Deo, 2014; Deo, 2015). Initial theoretical motivation for this idea comes from re-evaluation of key examples from the literature on English and other languages, showing the pragmatic inferencing is both unnecessary and insufficient as an explanation of change in this domain. The project’s empirical focus is on historical changes in modality in Hebrew over the past 130 years, from the time of its revival as a language with native speakers until the present day.

Research on DMs has mostly focused on either spoken or written data, showing a symbiotic relation between the functions and distribution of markers and a particular discourse type. The project aims to fill a significant gap both in the study of DMs and discourse types by exploring a varied set of markers across spoken and written (print and digital) forms of discourse in Egyptian (Cairene) Arabic. Egyptian Arabic provides a unique site for the proposed examination as it is a spoken language variety which is now in the process of becoming also a written language. It thus enables special insight into the emergence of conventions and the creation of new discourse types. The project is a first attempt to analyze these new forms of use of Egyptian Arabic from a pragmatic and meta-pragmatic perspective, aimed to identify and explain the new possibilities and constraints of using in writing a language variety so tightly associated with--i.e., adapted to and indexical of--oral-conversational discourse.