I have been working hard to get my French up to an advanced level for an upcoming trip to France, and I think I've been making good progress (see my main log, but the wanderlust bug has hit me hard. As you may be able to guess by the timing of this post, it was triggered when I watched Black Panther yesterday evening, where the main language of Wakanda was isiXhosa ("isi-" is a prefix in isiXhosa and isiZulu for the class of nouns that includes languages).
So, I've been interested in isiZulu for a long time. When I was very young, I learned the Zulu hymn "Siyahamba", or "We are marching" (literally "we are going" or "we go"). It was taught to me, during an audience participation portion of a concert, by a woman who clearly did not know any Zulu, because she taught us to click using the "cluck-cluck" sound that you might use to imitate the clip-clop of a trotting horse, a sound which does not exist in Zulu. Yesterday, I checked the lyrics online to see which click it really did use, and to my surprise, it didn't use a click at all, but a regular 'k' sound. So my first experience with isiZulu included a fairly egregious hypercorrection.
I am also a huge fan of Ladysmith Black Mambazo:
But when I really fell in love with the language was when I saw this video of Zulu tongue twisters:
So why does the thread say isiXhosa and not isiZulu? I have posted before about my interest in Zulu, even as recently as yesterday morning. Well, they are very similar languages, and a few things have been driving me more towards Xhosa.
First, the best video I've ever seen on how to do the three clicks ('c', 'x', and 'q') was in Xhosa, the second in a six-video series:
Then, a month or two ago, I saw this amazing clip of Trevor Noah, who is half Xhosa, talking about and singing in Xhosa:
And finally, there's a guy who works in a shop down the street who is from South Africa who speaks Xhosa but not Zulu, so there is at least one person I could potentially talk to in Xhosa and zero that I could talk to in Zulu.
And Black Panther finalized it. After the movie, I listened to Miriam Makeba's self-titled album, which contains the click song that Trevor Noah sang in the clip. Here is the terrific first track of the album:
Pronunciation
Luckily, the fact that I've studied Icelandic, one of the northernmost languages of Eurasiafrica, will give me a slight head start in learning a language from one the southernmost. The final "L" sound of Icelandic (also found as the "LL" sound in Welsh and in the "TL" of Nahuatl) also appears on Xhosa and Zulu, and being able to distinguish between aspirated and unaspirated consonants will also help me.
The clicks also don't seem to be too hard. Two of them are commonly used by Anglophones even if they aren't part of the language, and I think I'm getting the hang of the "Q" click too. I foresee a few main challenges:
- Learning to use new kinds of consonants:
- Slack-voiced
- Implosive
- Ejective?
- While there are only two tones, they are not reflected in the writing so I can't tell the tones just by reading a word.
- I don't believe vowel length is reflected in writing, either
In the next post I'll discuss the resources I plan on using, which are unfortunately fairly scant.