Ouma Geelmeid ke kx’u ǁxaǁxa Nǀuu

Abstract

Three sisters living near Upington in the Northern Cape province of South Africa are the last fluent speakers of Nǀuu. Linguists from the Centre for African Language Diversity (CALDi) at UCT produced an illustrated 160 page trilingual Nǀuu-Afrikaans-English reader in collaboration with community members to support revitalisation efforts of this highly endangered language. The hard copies of the reader are used in the Nǀuu language classes conducted by Ouma Geelmeid, the youngest of the three Nǀuu-speaking sisters. The reader features twelve thematic areas with phrases and sentences derived from everyday conversations, as well as games, prayers and songs taught by Ouma Geelmeid. Core cultural terms and basic vocabulary used in the Nǀuu language classes have been compiled in Nǀuu-Afrikaans-English and Afrikaans-Nǀuu-English glossaries. In addition, new Nǀuu language data is available to a wider audience, both academics and other interested parties, through the electronic online copy of the reader. This language data will be of particular interest to scholars working in a number of subfields of linguistics, including typology, historical linguistics and language contact studies.