Students click with new African language

Professor Sipho Mbuqe stood before his class of 10 students Wednesday night and wrote the… Professor Sipho Mbuqe stood before his class of 10 students Wednesday night and wrote the five vowels on the chalkboard. He then proceeded to have the class recite them. As one might expect, the sounds were a bit off from the way the vowels are pronounced in English.

But the sounds the students pronounced next were wholly unexpected.

Mbuqe wrote a “C” in front of each vowel, and the class began making a “tsk” sound. He erased the “C” and put a “Q” in place of it. The class sounded like ticking clocks.

These clicking sounds, represented by prefixes of C, Q or X (the “X” creates the sort of sound heard when calling a horse), might be unprecedented in most languages of the world, but they are a key feature of Xhosa.

This South African language – the second most widely spoken in the country and one that is used by Nelson Mandela – is being offered as a new course at Pitt through the Linguistics and Africana Studies departments this semester.

It is only one of about nine programs of its kind in the country, including ones at Yale and the University of Florida, according to The Center for Advanced Research on Language Acquisition.

During the course, students will learn how to communicate on a basic level so that if they travel to South Africa for tourist or business reasons, they will be able to converse with the locals.

Mbuqe, a native speaker of Xhosa, has many plans for how he will acquaint his students with Xhosa and the country of South Africa.

Mbuqe wants to give the class a little bit more of an understanding of the language than a tourist would have.

While many tourists may only know, at most, how to listen and speak the language, the students will also develop fundamental skills in reading and writing Xhosa, as well.

Currently, the class is learning the clicks and other common sounds used in the language, as well as basic statements such as greetings. After they learn these, Mbuqe, who is also a psychology graduate student at Duquesne University, will teach more complex concepts like sentence structure.

As for the clicks, Mbuqe said that there is no special significance to them. His understanding is that they were actually borrowed from another group of people. The Xhosa people, who were part of the Bantu migration into South Africa about 2000 years ago, encountered the nomadic Khoisan people, who spoke using clicks. The Xhosa language developed from there.

Linguistics major Sam Kramer is taking the class because he is interested in exotic languages and wants to get a feel for different languages around the world.

More importantly, he has hopes of traveling to South Africa in the next few years, where he will use what he’s learned in the class to communicate and thrive there.

Mbuqe also wants to teach his students about the culture of South Africa so that the country and the language will not feel so alien to them.

“If you want to access culture, the best way is through language,” Mbuqe said. “Xhosa is a way for those who want to access South Africa to do so.”

He’s already begun the discussion of this relationship. Wednesday night, he taught the suffix “kazi,” which, when added to another word, usually makes it feminine. This suffix can also denote huge or powerful, even though men play the dominant role in the Xhosa culture.

Mbuqe also uses motivation to make the students feel like the class is of value to them. He told his class, which is made up of primarily white students, that learning Xhosa will surprise the natives because so few white people in South Africa actually speak an African language.

By knowing a native language, students will receive great respect from the natives should they ever visit South Africa.

Mbuqe also said that knowing a native language like Xhosa could aid students in seeking jobs with the government or businesses that need to communicate with South Africans.

Mbuqe would like to see Xhosa become a permanent part of Pitt’s course catalog, and he is looking forward to the development of upper-level courses in the language that will better prepare students for contact with South Africa.

A plan has been set to make Xhosa into a four-semester sequence, according to Claude Mauk, director of Pitt’s Less Commonly Taught Languages Center.

Kramer said he would enroll in other levels of the language if they were offered.

Eventually, levels one and three will be offered in the fall term and levels two and four in the spring, as long as funding for the courses and student interest remains consistent.