The language with the most sounds in the world - !Xóõ

Special thanks to UCLA Phonetics Lab!
phonetics.linguistics.ucla.edu/
Bibliography:
Main studies:
- Christfried Naumann. The phoneme inventory of Taa (West !Xoon dialect). Max-Planck-Institut für evolutionäre Anthropologie Leipzig & Universität Leipzig. 2013
- Roland Kießling. Noun classification in !Xoon. Hamburg. 2008
- Christfried Naumann. A preliminary classification of Taa dialects. 20th International Conference on Historical Linguistics (ICHLXX). Humboldt University Berlin; Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology Leipzig.
- Christfried Naumann. High and low tone in Taa (!Xóõ). 2008
Other studies:
- Lee J. Pratchett. Anthony Traill (edited by Hirosi Nakagawa and Andy Chebanne), A trilingual !Xóõ dictionary: !Xóõ - English - Setswana. 2018
- Catherine T. Best, Anthony Traill, Allyson Carter, K. David Harrison, and Alice Faber. !Xóõ click perception by English, Isizulu, and Sesotho listeners. 2003
- Alena Witzlack-Makarevich and Hirosi Nakagawa. Linguistic features and typologies in languages commonly referred to as ‘Khoisan’. 2017
- Christfried Naumann. Vowels of Taa (West !Xoon) and their acoustic properties (Presentation). Humboldt-Universitat zu Berlin. 2013
Interesting articles/other stuff:
- DOBES Documentation of Taa Language.
dobes.mpi.nl/projects/taa/
- Clicks and Voice Quality in !Xóõ samples. (LMU of Munich)
www.phonetik.uni-muenchen.de/...
- Xoa ke Taa ǂAan -!Xuun ǀa ǂxanya - A Primer for Writing Taa -West !Xoon version. 2015. Christfried Naumann & Many others. (Illustrations by Stefanus Kuwi Geinǂamseb and Johannes ǁXau Kundeb)
- The Economist. We went in search of the world’s hardest language. 2016. medium.economist.com/we-went-...
- Anthony Traill. A !Xóõ DICTIONARY. Köln. 1994.
Videos:
- (ILoveLanguages!) - TAA/ǃXÓÕ PEOPLE, CULTURE, & LANGUAGE
• TAA/ǃXÓÕ PEOPLE, CULTU...
00:00 - Introduction
01:20 - Classification
03:44 - People
05:57 - Vowels
08:45 - Consonants Types
10:44 - Consonants (Clicks)
12:24 - Consonants (Other Properties)
13:44 - Consonant IPA Chart
15:10 - Consonant Clusters
17:23 - Consonants Summary & Thoughts
18:46 - Grammar (Word Order, Gender & Examples)
25:20 - Anthony Traill - The GOAT Researcher
28:10 - Conclusion
28:51 - Shawn reads in !Xóõ
#!xoo #language #languages #namibia #botswana #click

[@volodymyrkilchenko]

19:31 something is wrong, SOV or SVO?

[@reformational]

@imshawngetoffmylawn I was also going to note this. You said SVO, but had written SOV.

[@roymarsh8077]

Just a mistake. Should be SVO

[@imshawngetoffmylawn]

Yeah, that’s my mistake! It should be SVO, I messed up the letters bigtime. Apologies, everyone!

[@deweypatch]

I imagine if you asked a !Xóõ speaker what the most difficult language was, he would say Rotokas. "How could you possibly say all you wanted to say with only eleven sounds?"

[@AylaKD]

Don't you mean !Xóõ?

[@theepicninja1936]

​@@AylaKD probs computer user

[@practicemodebutton7559]

windows+. ?

[@psychopathmedia]

!Xóõ sounds like if encryption were a language

[@norielgames4765]

The amount of respect you have for a group of people who most likely will never watch this video is amazing. It really is heartwarming. Thank you.

[@limitess9539]

as a non-linguist who doesn't even understand many of these linguistic concepts, I experienced brain rot, but listening to him read in this weirdo language was satisfying, it sounds weird but cool

[@krening]

I love your videos dude, and the fact that you focus mainly on the more obscure languages with so many cool quirks, your channel is a hidden gem

[@MoonshineH]

Been watching this dude for 2 or 3 years 😎

[@DavidStDenis-qi2yp]

I’m honestly amazed how humans can make these sounds, I had no idea that clicks could be ejective and voiced, love your videos

[@AlexanderDumb]

Why are you on my lawn?

[@assomeoneelse2275]

I am a celevating celemander

[@I_Love_Learning]

No, you are on his lawn.

[@hobog]

Is this a reference to "The Gods Must Be Crazy"?

[@AlexanderDumb]

It's a reference to him being on my lawn@@hobog

[@phrimphrao54]

132 road st

[@Nooticus]

Incredible video. Just so respectful, non-political, thorough and easy to understand. Your skill at language education is incredible.

[@costernocht]

Holy Mackerel. !Xóõ makes Navajo seem ... well, easier!

[@irmafoster3933]

Not for certain. The sound structure, organization of sounds, and tonal presentation are only a small part of the equation. How you think on a subject, object, relational idea affects a language. Hard, difficult or easy are simply relative.

[@jagmeemees]

Spent the entire video trying to figure out how the hell you pronounce the alveolar click/uvular fricative cluster

[@atlasaltera]

Amazing job in pronouncing the Taa endonyms effortlessly! I love your language videos! They are a great resource for some of the lesser known languages in our amazingly diverse world.

[@OFNSO8WBRIC8S82U]

Literally 🏓🏓🏓 language.

[@greengrey-yt]

???

[@schwinkle716]

@@greengrey-yt It's a joke about how the language's clicks sound like Ping-Pong hits.

[@greengrey-yt]

@@schwinkle716 ohhhh

[@Scrufflord]

to a filthy monolingual like me it sounds to me like a southeast asian language being spoken while simultaneously playing ping pong and getting punched in the stomach

[@disekjoumoer]

The noun classes remind me a bit of other local Bantu languages like Zulu, Xhosa, Tswana etc. They also all have clicks, some have tones and between 11 to 18 classes or something like that. The weird thing is that classes re prefixes in all of them, and the verbal agreement is with both the subject and object. You should do a video on Zulu for fun.

[@wilhelmseleorningcniht9410]

yeh Bantu languages in southern Africa borrowed clicks from the Khoisan languages

[@JohnSmith-of2gu]

I utterly LOVE this video: It summarizes the fascinating features of this language without sensationalizing, while also giving a concise summary of linguistic concepts to the layman. Very nice job, you have both skill and integrity as a presenter!

[@carlborneke8641]

I recently became interested in the Taa language and this is without a doubt the absolute best video about it. Especially the part where you describe the clicks.

[@finnfox6761]

Спасибо вам за это невероятное, мудрое погружение в этот язык, целую лингвистическую параллельную вселенную, тот опыт, которым вы поделились с нами воодушевляет ум и сердце :)

[@imshawngetoffmylawn]

Спасибо огромное за комментарий! Желаю вам всего лучшего!

[@Roman-bg2lh]

16:11 издаёт звуки как будто кот шерстью подавился

[@zupa420]

Oh my. I stumbled across a mention of !Xóõ on Facebook and it blew my mind, so I decided to research a little out of curiosity. I’m so glad that you made this video. It was so informative and I’m particularly happy about the opportunity to hear some of it! You are a brilliant person, I really like your attitude towards languages and listening to you is entertaining, love the way you explain certain aspects. Definitely will stay here for longer, you’re such a nice person!

[@teucer915]

There's one more language outside of the "Khoisan" and a Bantu families which, according to some researchers, is developing a click out of certain consonant clusters (mostly /tk/) that occur only at morpheme boundaries. It's not presently a phonemic click, nor is it universal among speakers, so it's not false to leave it off the list of click languages, but I think bringing it up can help us think of these sounds as fitting within ordinary phonology (which they do) rather than being a world apart (as many people who don't know much linguistics think of them), since it's a language people don't exoticize the way we often do languages from the global south. I'm referring, of course, to German.

[@caoilfhionndunbar]

hwat

[@teucer915]

@@caoilfhionndunbar many German speakers, especially young ones, are pronouncing /tk/ as [k!] and that's very unexpected but IMO very cool. German does not have any click phonemes, but a hundred years from now it might!

[@abcde2325]

​@@teucer915 i'm gonna reject it

[@arvohyvarinen4975]

@@teucer915this is fascinating! do you happen to know or have any videos showcasing this?

[@troelspeterroland6998]

So in words like 'Sandkasten' or 'Mundkorb'?

[@joemiller947]

So happy to see you again!

[@lumi2030]

your narration is very entertaining, it makes me wanna keep watching. it's not common. good job

[@sondreheh5116]

I'm always happy to see a new vid by shawn!

[@petzo57]

Tolles Video! Ein Hammer diese Sprache und wie du diese absolut verrückten Laute zustandebringst!!

[@johnnzboy]

Your videos astonish and humble me.

[@bloodystatic4156]

This language has a morphology that is sort of, though not too similar to the Ojibwe language that is spoken in Quebec, Ontario, Manitoba, Saskatchewan, Michigan, Wisconsin, Minnesota, North Dakota and Montana. Though the language bares more of a resemblance to the calls and songs of birds, except the phonemes are made with the tongue rather than a beak or special air sacks.

[@LuisAldamiz]

Re. grammar (genders) that may have been a thing in many languages in the past. For example Basque has not just distinctions for animate and inanimate (plants included) which is still functional but more strangely most body parts begin with "b-" (buru, begi, belarri, beso, bizkar, belaun, etc.) , which I've read occasionally to have been identified as some sort of fossil feature from a forgotten distant past. Now that you mentioned the massive diversity of "genders" in ǃxóõ, I recalled and made me think that may have happened in other languages before they evolved into some simplification. I realize it's a total chimera to reconstruct "proto-Human" but these obscure items may be leads and maybe, only maybe, with the help of properly trained artificial intelligence, we (i.e. someone else but in the same general category of human as myself) may some day make greater inroads in this issue.

[@believeinpeace]

Me encanta mucho tu vídeo. Muchas gracias 🙂

[@beadingbusily]

I had a teacher in high school, perhaps two, who spoke languages with those characteristics. Those countries make sense. It was an exchange program.

[@benvanzon3234]

Amazing video, also wondering if you're ever going to make a video about Navajo?

[@jriceblue]

It's really nice to see a linguistically technical video on the language, thanks!

[@Hellinophilos]

A truly outstanding video.

[@gargamel3478]

We need to make this the international language!

[@KindlyKalen]

*NO*

[@gargamel3478]

@@KindlyKalen *YES*

[@KindlyKalen]

@@gargamel3478 I struggle to pronounce clicks, please, spare me.

[@gargamel3478]

@@KindlyKalen It'd be like you can't speak english, so no one can be spared

[@LambdaCreates]

@@gargamel3478What I just DON'T speak !Xóõ?

[@okjhum]

Awesome video! Congratulations and thanks from this random phonetician, language nerd and wannabe polyglot in Sweden! I love your attitude to the !Xóõ language and other languages in general as well as to their speakers, particularly if they are endangered. Every language and every dialect is both perfect and optimal for those who speak it!

[@2906nico]

This was a total joy to watch. I can't begin to say how incredibly clever this man is.

[@frankiedomanico9701]

I always wanted to pronounce Khoisan words. Thanks for helping me by making this video!

[@MoonshineH]

HE’S BACK

[@antarae]

Well done, love the sigh at the end 😂

[@ianalves1802]

This videos make me know that languages are a passion

[@bunk_foss]

I love this man SM.

[@bneymanov]

Verbal cross-reference is like ergagivity's evil twin.

[@timothytikker1147]

Years ago, I got a recording of a lecture in African languages, that mentioned one which had something like 50 clicks in it. So the title of your video caught my eye, as I've been wondering about this now for years. Thanks for sharing!

[@fernaukas]

Estoy sorprendido por su detallada explicación de la lengua !Xoo y he disfrutado con sus ejemplos en la pronunciación. Un fantástico vídeo

[@MAELAET_]

hey i was just wondering if you can do a video about Adyghe or Abkhaz i can look at it and think its awsome but i dont really understand when i read it also i love you videos keep it going

[@Punyulada]

As a non-linguistics major who lived in Southern Africa for a time and STRUGGLED with the difference between ! (alveolar clicks) and palatal clicks, I can articulate them distinctly for the first time ever... and I'm not even living in the African continent anymore. Thank you for demonstrating them in such an easy to understand way. I've also been personally fascinated with !Xóõ even never having heard anyone use the language, being surrounded by Zulu and Xhosa speakers for a while. EDIT: I also have to bring up that I appreciate the respect you have for these people! I find very few non-South Africans who afford the time and care you took with discussing their identities as people groups!

[@Siguwiipi]

On the Nǁng language, that last speaker, named Katrina Esau, has been trying to revitalize her language (the dialect Nǀuu) among her people for around two decades. I really hope she succeeds and her language won’t go extinct!

[@Pingijno]

The kind of classification you were talking about at the start can be referred to as a sprachbund, diffusion area, linguistic area or linguistic convergence

[@LeoJaramaz]

Great work! It would be nice to do videos like this one about South American languages… such as Piraha or Yaghan, for example.

[@ksiistoyiiwa]

Before I enrolled for a bachelor's degree at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg,where Professor Traill was the head of the Department of Linguistics, I had the pleasure of sitting in as a guest in one of his lectures. To this day, 40 plus years later, I regret that I wasn't able to register for Linguistics as a sub-major (my majors were French and English) because of timetable clashes. I would describe myself as a language geek, and as a Linguistics wannabe geek. "Wannabe", because I couldn't register for French and Linguistics in the same year at the same time, and missed out on the opportunity to get a thorough grounding in the subject. I am very impressed by your reading of that text, even though I have no right to judge it at all!

[@smergthedargon8974]

9:50 Most Vowel-Heavy Georgian Word:

[@jinyoungmysteria193]

Hey shawn! Seeing how much you enjoyed how crazy the phonetics and phonology of !Xóõ are, I believe you'll also enjoy how many consonants and tones the Hmong language has! There are 8 tones in total along with 13 vowel sounds. And, depending on the dialect, there can be up 60 consonants in total and +1 additional vowel sound. A language review video of the Hmong language would be amazing to see!

[@atlasaltera]

Also what is that map in your backdrop!? It looks really cool!

[@bumpty9830]

Clicks/ingressives are _slightly_ easier than you described. You don't _breathe_ in to pronounce them, pulling air into the lungs, but rather pull air into the mouth the same way air is ejected from the mouth in "glottal egressives", or "ejectives" as they're sometimes known. But... ejective ingressives?

[@meowkni]

очень крутое видео как всегда, обожаю тебя смотреть

[@palmermcmath5822]

You know you gotta do a vid on Damin next!

[@sindisodube6257]

I speak a click language and I am thoroughly impressed by your pronunciation!

[@bumpty9830]

Which language?

[@sindisodube6257]

@@bumpty9830 Ndebele, Zulu, Xhosa

[@Kalculatedpanik]

Wild.

[@williamkeitaro8910]

Languages like this is what made me interested in Linguistics in the first place, i can't imagine what it feels like to be able to literally beatbox or sound like a really cool badass alien when having a casual conversation or reading a text, because right now i cant even whistle or make the ''TH'' sound properly

[@bumpty9830]

Verbs agreeing with objects isn't so strange in the context of nearby Bantu languages. Xhosa, for example (which apparently borrowed clicks from "Khoi San" languages), marks verbs both for the subject and for the object as is typical for Bantu languages. Depending on who's doing the writing and when, the markers have been written as separate words or as part of the "conjugated" verb. Now in Bantu languages the subject marker is first, followed by a tense/aspect marker and then the object, followed by the verb root (and sometimes suffixes). But it's not hard to imagine that if the object happened to come at the end instead, this grammar would look very similar to !Xoo example you gave where the verb seems to be marked only for the object "sheep." I would even find it unsurprising if this feature turned out to be borrowed from Bantu while Bantu people were borrowing click consonants. (The noun class system also somewhat resembles Bantu at least superficially, although Bantu languages tend to mark noun class with prefixes.)

[@bunk_foss]

As a native speaker of !Xóõ, Nah I'm just kidding I can't imagine any know English and will see this video sadly. 😔

[@tomaszgarbino2774]

Your acting toolbox really grows over time. 👍 And yea, I think counting consonant clusters as consonants IS cheating, too. If you did it for some Slavic languages or for Georgian they'd be serious contenders for the title.

[@FrithonaHrududu02127]

Why do I always think of your channel's name to the tune of get off My cloud by The rolling Stones

[@HikidyMapping]

so easy to learn.

[@ZoveRen]

There's also a theory that Khoisan languages are related to languages of native Australians

[@isaacbruner65]

Fascinating, for some reason I didn't even think voiced aspirated and ejective consonants were possible! Unless maybe they're actually breathy voiced like Hindi.

[@Impasta_Tronic78]

wow. mi lukin e sitelen tawa ni. ni li pini la, mi lawa li nasa😵

[@volodymyrkilchenko]

lawa mi*

[@pas-giaw6055]

a, jan pi ken toki pona

[@Impasta_Tronic78]

@@pas-giaw6055 toki! ni li pona mute a tawa lukin e jan pi toki pona lon ma ni!

[@tookiecar1]

???

[@gabrielg2395]

@@tookiecar1it’s in toki pona.

[@yglyglya]

Can you make a video about the karachay-circassian language?

[@user-pr2yx8mr1b]

Should do a video on dhivehi and its dialects.

[@HenryLeslieGraham]

i have a bible in Nama. it is quite the thing to read since it like !Xóõ makes use of an eclectic alphabet/orthography.

[@csolisr]

Still trying to wrap my head around the social and political context that caused a language to wind up with such an extensive phonetic and grammatical inventory.

[@ankokunokayoubi]

Preserve it at all cost.

[@Kurkulevich]

0:16 Bro for real said ll🗣

[@mrSeagull120]

i just learned that shawn is a very very good ping pong ball

[@sdfjsd]

Hey you were actually pretty good at reading that story

[@zw2al]

I heard about this language last year in class and always wanted to learn more things about it thanks :)

[@keithle_]

Nice video about language in speaking, what about the writing? Pretty sure it isnt written in latin or ipa.

[@bumpty9830]

Do you have any insight into the reason Khoi-San languages (probably under a different name) aren't discussed as a "Language Area"/Sprachbund? As you pointed out, shared features don't indicate a genetic relationship between the languages, but otherwise rare features shared by neighboring languages probably DO indicate the effects of areal linguistics if there is no genetic relationship. There are features shared back and forth with Bantu languages as well, so it may be a complex situation with much time depth, but nevertheless it seems like a modern treatment of this somehow-related group of languages is due.

[@battyboio]

Learn this and every other language will be childs play in comparison

[@Squirrelmind66]

I find it interesting that the languages closest (presumably) to the lands of human origins has the most sounds, while the furthest reach of human settlement - the pacific islands - has the fewest.

[@ikengaspirit3063]

Eh, Khoi and hazda are probably closer to the point of origin and have less but many sounds.

[@Squirrelmind66]

But still more then Hawaiian, which is the farthest human settlement before the age of colonialism.

[@siarhian10]

i wonder what the chances of a native speaker finding this video and giving feedback would be. certainly small, but I doubt impossible

[@norielgames4765]

How did the story continue?

[@happybee2701]

I can't stop rofling when you say kho and click with your tongue at the same time 😆

[@LucyInTheSkyWithDiamonds69]

19:20 SAME

[@okjhum]

@17:40 "As click-baity as possible" - Well said! :-D

[@SiqueScarface]

An interesting observation: if you go farther away from the !Xóõ language, the native tongues have less and less phonemes, until you arrive at the opposite side of the globe in Polynesia, where languages sometimes have less than 20 phonemes in total, with Hawaiian having only 13 phonemes.

[@blofyjo4595]

Could you one day make a video about the broken plural in arabic. It just break my mind

[@protolingus]

Listening to the recording of the native speaker, there's seems to be something interesting going on with stops too. Is that just an artifact of being a click language and my brain is interpreting it weird, or is there actually something going on that I'm picking up on?

[@LuisAldamiz]

What all the "Khoisan" languages have in common is that they derive from the first branch breaking apart from ancestral humanity, maybe 170,000 years ago (!!!), when they migrated first to East Africa and then to Southern Africa. It's an extremely old group but does have a common distinct root anyhow. Before the Bantu migration there was only one other flow into Southern Africa but by people of the same broader branch, who adopted herding and difussed it to other populations (Khoikhoi most famously) and may be original from East Africa.

[@wilhelmseleorningcniht9410]

Khoisan peoples, not languages.

[@LuisAldamiz]

@@wilhelmseleorningcniht9410 - Languages are also treated as a pseudo-family because of some affinities like the use of clicks, much as Papuan languages are even if nobody can actually prove they're a true family.

[@intergalactic-oboist]

You know you’re too into linguistics when you’re like “That sounds reasonable” when you get to the grammar(not the phonology tho, THAT is insane)

[@derwandereruberdemnebelmee5061]

так-так-тааак, теперь требую видео об убыхском!

[@SiqueScarface]

Just as a side note: Grown up with my native German and knowing Dutch, I never understood the appeal of the SVO-SOV-VSO-VOS-OSV-OVS-classification, as neither German nor Dutch fall in any of the categories any better than a square peg fits through a round hole. Yes, you can force them in, but you miss the very core of both languages's word order system, which is centered around the verbal frame, the idea, that you split the verb of the sentence into two parts and use them as a structural bracket around your sentence, while you pull the most important part in the sentence out and put it in front. I can create you sentences in both languages, which are grammarly correct, which can be used in daily language without standing out as strange, and which can have any of the word orders above.

[@sirrathersplendid4825]

At one or two points in the vid, honestly thought I was watching a Monty Python sketch!

[@faridgainutdinov6082]

At least this incredible language doesn't contain different vowel tones...

[@dilgeatakan9366]

Imagine this as an IAL

[@Lo0orak]

Спустя неделю решил зайти,а видео нету! очень грустно(((

[@sdfjsd]

I'm practicing. I think I'm getting better.

[@seneca983]

21:00 This doesn't sound that weird to me. The only foreign languages besides English that I have studied are German and Swedish. I think you usually can't deduce the grammatical gender of a noun from its meaning or spelling/pronunciation with some exceptions. Of course, they only have 3 and 2 grammatical genders so in that sense it's easier than 9 noun classes.

[@Imita0903]

This language make ubykh (not sure if its spell like that) looks easy, they have "only" 80 consonants and 3 vowels.

[@kissmysoup]

Shawn, I'm on your lawn.

[@HenryLeslieGraham]

id offer to share examples of !Xóõ in written form, but its mostly a spoken language. as you know when oral languages start to be written down - a standardised orthography is developed - which I'm not sure has been finalised for !Xóõ yet, or has been recently standardised for one dialect. not sure. the next step is often to begin a bible translation (as much of the work of recording and standardising languages like !Xóõ has historically been done by bible societies/mission organisations. as far as I know no bible translation into !Xóõ has been published. so I don't know if there are any texts out there of significant length in !Xóõ. but I could be wrong.

[@M.athematech]

In the Biblical Hebrew of say the books of Chronicles, the verb changes accoring to both subject and object.