Parameters of Morphosyntactic Variation in Khoe-Kwadi¹

Mainly spoken in Namibia and Botswana, Khoe-Kwadi languages belong to the typological unit “Southern African Khoisan,” which is most prominently defined by the existence of phonemic click consonants. Typologically, Khoe-Kwadi languages share characteristics that set them aside from neighboring Khoisan languages of the Kx'a and Tuu families, including a sex-based gender system, verb-final constituent order, and head-final noun phrases. Despite these commonalities, recent advances in language documentation suggest that Khoe-Kwadi languages display considerable morphosyntactic variation which, to date, has not been assessed from a comparative perspective. Following Marten et al.'s (2007) seminal study of the Bantu languages, we develop a set of 20 descriptive parameters which are compared across 13 languages from the family's three branches Kwadi, Khoekhoe, and Kalahari Khoe. We explore implicational correlations between some of the parameters and discuss possible repercussions for the subclassification of Khoe-Kwadi. Our results suggest an outlier status of Naro within the Kalahari Khoe branch, as well as a north–south split between the remaining Kalahari Khoe languages. Taken together, these findings offer new perspectives on the subclustering of the Khoe-Kwadi languages, and challenge previous hypotheses about the family's migration routes within southern Africa.