Hadza as Afrasian?

Alexander Militarev (Institute of Linguistics of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Moscow; amilitarev@gmail.com)

Journal of Language Relationship, № 21/1-2, 2023 - p.71-90

Abstract: In this paper, I address the issue of the genetic affiliation of Hadza, the language of a tiny tribe of Tanzanian hunter-gatherers, genetically separated from other groups of Homo sapiens by some hundred thousand years and occupying the same area for over 50,000 years; the language was formerly considered to be Khoisan because of its click-containing phonetic inventory, but is now regarded as an isolate. The paper provides parallels from various Afrasian (Afro-Asiatic) languages, tied together through regular consonant correspondences and fairly strict semantic criteria, to the extensive Hadza lexical material collected by American linguists with the help of their Hadza collaborators; the parallels are drawn from the standard 100-item Swadesh wordlist (including the 50-item subset of the most stable items based on the selection of Sergei and George Starostin) as well as from other semantic groups. The author analyzes other explanations for these matches (such as accidental look-alikes; borrowings into Hadza from neighboring and even geographically distant Afrasian languages; common substrate), but concludes that the most plausible explanation is genetic affinity. The position of Hadza within the Afrasian super-family is, according to lexicostatistics, more or less equally close to the Omotic and Cushitic families; glottochronology dates the separation between Proto-Hadza, Proto-Cushitic and Proto-Omotic to the turn of the 10-9th millennia BCE when a group of Afrasian speakers presumably made it to Northern Tanzania and passed on t heir language to the (presumably) formerly Khoisan-speaking Hadza ancestors.

Keywords: Hadza language, Afrasian languages, genetic affinity, sound correspondences, lexicostatistics, etymology, lexical borrowing

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