The archive
Hadza
Clicks, and no way to write them down
A hunter-gatherer language of northern Tanzania with clicks, no relatives anywhere, and no writing system anyone agrees on.
ScriptNo settled written form; two competing orthographies
Speakers1k
Weeks to a working levelNot on any difficulty scale. There are no courses, no textbooks and no dictionary you can buy.
- It is an isolate. It was filed under Khoisan for decades because of the clicks, and the shared vocabulary that would justify the label has never been found.
- There are native words for one and two, and everything above that is borrowed, mostly from Swahili. This has been read as proof that the Hadza never counted, which does not follow from it.
- Clicks are ordinary consonants here, not sound effects. They sit inside words the way k and t do in English.
- Killed game gets its own vocabulary. A dead zebra is not called a zebra: there is a separate set of triumphal words for roughly a dozen large animals, used on the way back from the hunt.
- Fewer than a thousand people speak it, and writing it accurately is still argued over, so learning it means going and living there.
Where to practise it
Reading about a language is not speaking it. These are the places I would go to find someone to speak Hadza with.
The Hadza Passepartout is not out yet
Five printed pages that carry you through the arrival. Leave your address and you hear about it first, and nothing else.
Leaving takes one click.
Stories in Hadza
Short stories written inside a measured vocabulary, with the word lists and nothing invented for a textbook.