dagga

The word 'dagga' — the South African and broader southern African English term for cannabis (marijuana) — ultimately derives from the Khoikhoi language, one of the non-Bantu indigenous languages of southern Africa belonging to the Khoisan family. Khoikhoi and its relatives (including !Kung, Nama, and the now-extinct /Xam) are characterized by their use of click consonants — sounds represented in romanization by !, /, ǁ, and ǂ — that make them among the most phonologically complex language families on earth and represent what linguistic and genetic evidence suggests are some of the world's oldest continuous language lineages. The Khoikhoi word recorded by early Dutch settlers at the Cape was dacha or dagga, denoting the cannabis plant, which grew wild in parts of southern Africa and had ritual and medicinal uses among both Khoikhoi and later San peoples.

Dutch settlers at the Cape Colony (established 1652) encountered the Khoikhoi people and recorded their vocabulary, including dacha for cannabis. The word was absorbed into Cape Dutch and then into Afrikaans — the creole-like language that developed from seventeenth-century Dutch at the Cape — as dagga. From Afrikaans it passed into South African English, where it has been used since at least the nineteenth century as the standard term for cannabis, distinct from the more neutral 'cannabis' of scientific discourse and the American 'marijuana' of journalistic writing. The word appeared in South African newspapers and court records throughout the colonial and apartheid eras as the standard legal and colloquial term. It entered British English through South African sources in the twentieth century and appears in major English dictionaries as a South African English term for cannabis.

The word 'dagga' carries within it an extraordinary linguistic history: it is one of the very few words in any European-influenced language that originates in a Khoisan tongue. The Khoisan languages contributed almost nothing else to English or Afrikaans (the click consonants and alien phonology made borrowing difficult), making 'dagga' a remarkable survivor — a piece of Khoikhoi vocabulary that traveled from the world's most ancient language family through Dutch colonialism and Afrikaans into English. As cannabis legalization has spread globally in the twenty-first century, South Africa has debated its own laws, and 'dagga' has appeared in legislative language, court judgments, and news coverage — the Constitutional Court of South Africa ruled in 2018 on private cannabis use in a judgment that used 'dagga' throughout. The ancient Khoikhoi plant-name has ended up in constitutional jurisprudence.