Click Variation and Reacquisitionin Two South African Ndebele Varieties

This article deals with click consonants in two Nguni varieties of South Africa, namely isiNdebele, or Southern Ndebele, as it is better known outside of South Africa; and Sindebele, or Northern Transvaal Ndebele. We review previous research on the topic, in which isiNdebele been described as having a somewhat reduced click inventory compared to better described Nguni languages, and Sindebele has been claimed to have lost clicks completely. We also review previous research on click loss, variation, and acquisition. We then describe the current situation of both language varieties regarding clicks. For Sindebele, we observe that while clicks indeed seem to have been almost completely replaced by other consonants, some speakers still do produce clicks in isolated words, possibly as a result of recent contact with isiZulu. In isiNdebele, we find that the lateral click has been lost almost completely, while the distinction between dental and postalveolar has been lost for some speakers (with most of them preferring the dental click), whereas some speakers still maintain the distinction. We propose a tentative correlation between increasing formal education in the isiNdebele language and the tendency to maintain the two clicks as distinct, but generally find the functional load of the distinction to be very low, at least on a lexical level.