Which Language Uses the Most Sounds? Click 5 Times for the Answer

Khoisan language persists in South Africa-about 20% of South Africans can communicate in Khosa-and I have heard it frequently in my travels there. It is one of the major language groups in South Africa. Taa has a more restricted distribution but will persist in Namibia.
I was most interested to hear my host in Johannesburg, a white South African, speak in Khosa to a service group who would install a fence on his property. It is difficult for a non-native speaker to learn Khoisan languages and to produce the sounds-but seemingly not impossible. Khosa seems to be a language which will continue in South Africa-being one of the official languages.

"Fittingly for the language with the most sounds, !Xoon is rich with words that describe noises. The sound of a sharp object falling point-first into sand is ǂqùhm ǁhûũ The sound of a rotten egg when shaken is !húlu ts’êẽ. The sound of grass being ripped by a grazing animal: gǀkx’àp"

Do they have a word for onomatopoeia?

I think it would great to hear Todd Rundgren's song of that title sung in !Xoon.

I had a roommate from college who was from Rhodesia and had grown up with some of the indigenous people. He used to repeat a very brief phrase which was apparently a sort of a tongue-twister in the local click language, and which apparently meant "The polecat has ruptured his windpipe."
Trying to reproduce it, as a native English speaker, provided hours of entertainment.

Fascinating. Africa is the most linguistically and genetically diverse place on the planet. I would love to read more in the NY Times about its various peoples, languages and cultures.

Interesting! A study (Atkinson, 2011) attempted to explain why phonemic (sound) complexity decreases as you get farther from Africa. The author demonstrates that population size is a predictor of size of the inventory of phonemes used in a language. This suggests that as small colonizing groups of early humans broke off from a larger group in their spread across the globe, each small group of cultural founders would cause a phonemic bottleneck as they abandoned some of their phonemes. It seems like a good explanation why older languages like !Xoon are so much more complex than later Oceanic languages.

Worth a glance:
http://science.sciencemag.org/content/332/6027/346.full

!Truly fascinating article by Bryant Rousseau. He's got me wanting to try this language out. I appreciate that the whisper is difficult. But even in whisperable languages, onlookers know that something sensitive is being said anyway during a whisper. With the facial expressions of the participants, sometimes the subject of the whisper is guessable anyway.

If there is a protocol to breath in for consonants and out for vowels, it makes speaking !Xoon easier.

Right now I have a cold, so I don't know how well speaking in !Xoon would go. Some sounds seem to be okay, but if there are ones that involve the throat, not so well.

And how does !Xoon stand up to complexity of thought? It's hard to imagine a lecture on Schopenhauer in !Xoon, although evidently it would be shorter.

Khosian languages remind me of the funny routine by the great Victor Borge in which he uses "phonetic punctuation". He'd have been at home in !Xoon.

And it looks like !Xoon could be useful for Trump and his followers on Twitter. They might be able to communicate more information than what is contained in the irrational grunts that they tweet now. Maybe there is some truth in their nonsense that !Xoon would enable them to express.

There seems to be some correlation between the number of phonemes in a language and distance from humanity's origins. The Khoisan languages, with as many as 200 separate phonemes, are spoken close the the places where the most ancient human remains have been found. Polynesian languages, on the other extreme, are spoken on the part of the earth last settled by human beings, and they have notoriously few phonemes. Hawaiian has as few as 13 by some counts, or 33 at the most if you count long vowels and diphthongs as separate phonemes.

Languages seem to decline in complexity over time. Just think of the many verb conjugations in proto-Indo-European. Fewer in ancient Greek and in Latin. Fewer still in modern languages.

Some of the simplification probably results from developing written language. Preliterate cultures have no need to standardize pronunciation via a limited number of written letters.

We probably underestimate the greater complexity of ancient and preliterate groups because of our need to believe in progress. Yes, there is technological progress. But there is also cultural regress.

My late mother's mitochondrial DNA most closely matches the San Khoisan people who are the most ancient unique modern human surviving population. There is more genetic DNA diversity in a Sub-Saharan African village or ethnic group than in all of the rest of the human race combined. Indeed, the rest of humanity carries the hall marks of an inbred genetic bottle neck that nearly wiped them out entirely. Language is an essential cultural marker.

Is it possible that !Xoo or a predecessor was the language that evolved into all other languages? Tones were retained in Chibese and other languages. The clicks may have become the missing sounds in Proto-Indo European.

Very interesting. Always fascinated with this language ever since I heard the African singer and activist, Miriam Makeba in my youth.

Reflecting on the title, I wonder if music could not be considered the language with most sounds. It is a form of communication, though very different in nature and purpose from the oral languages (which, I recognize, really were the topic of this article).