Hottentot

Hottentot is spoken in South West Africa. Its speakers are not numerous—about 75,000—and constitute about one-fifteenth of the country's population. Like Bushman, Hottentot belongs to the Khoisan family of languages.

Hottentot is another of the "click" languages, the sounds represented by such symbols as /, ‡, //, !, and #. When the earliest Dutch settlers in southern Africa first encountered this language, they described it as consisting of nothing more than the sounds hot and tot. Thus arose the term Hottentot. Today it has a somewhat derisive connotation and many people prefer the term Nama, the name of the largest Hottentot-speaking tribe.