Morphological Khoisan influence in the Southern African Bantu language Yeyi

Abstract

Abstract Language contact with Khoisan languages has resulted in the adoption of click phonemes in certain southern African Bantu languages. Contact-induced changes outside the phonological domain, however, are less commonly recognized. This paper provides a first ever analysis of morphological influence from Khoisan languages in Yeyi, a Bantu language spoken in Botswana and Namibia. Firstly, Yeyi has a set of lexical verbs that take an obligatory prefix i- or ra-, and both these prefixes and many of the verbs on which they occur are of Khoisan origin. Secondly, Yeyi has four verbal derivational suffixes that have been copied from Khoisan languages. The description of these contact-induced changes in Yeyi shows that contact with Khoisan languages, especially those of the Khoe family, involved extensive bilingualism. Dialectal difference in Yeyi furthermore suggests that Khoisan contact was more intense in Botswana than in Namibia. As some linguistic changes appear to derive from Khoisan languages that are not spoken in the vicinity of Yeyi, the language contact situation in which they arose was quite different from the one that occurs today.