impala

Impala comes from Zulu impala, meaning gazelle or antelope, with the noun-class prefix im- attached to the root -pala. The word was first recorded in English in 1875, though the species had an earlier English name: palla or pallah, from Tswana phala (red antelope), which appears in records from 1802. The Zulu name impala displaced the Tswana-derived form and became the standard English term, reflecting the greater influence of Zulu-speaking regions in southern Africa on the vocabulary of colonial natural history. The genus name Aepyceros melampus, assigned by the German zoologist Martin Hinrich Lichtenstein in 1812, is Greek — from aepys (high, tall) and keras (horn) — but it is the Zulu word that everyone uses, from wildlife guides to car dealerships.

The impala (Aepyceros melampus) is a medium-sized antelope native to eastern and southern Africa, living in woodlands and the boundaries between woodland and savanna. Its most dramatic behavior is its leap: an impala can jump three meters high and ten meters long in a single bound, and groups of impala will leap apparently randomly when threatened, creating a visual confusion that makes it difficult for predators to track a single individual. This leaping behavior has been called 'stotting' or 'pronking' in the scientific literature, but in southern African ecological memory it is simply what impala do — a characteristic so well known that it was embedded in vernacular observation long before behavioral ecologists quantified it.

The impala is distinguished by a distinctive patch of black hair on its heels that conceals a scent gland — a feature so characteristic that early European naturalists, when they encountered what Tswana speakers called phala, initially thought they were looking at a different species from what Zulu speakers called impala. The taxonomic confusion was eventually resolved, but the episode illustrates the degree to which colonial natural history relied on and was sometimes confounded by the different nomenclatures of different African language communities. The same animal carried different names in different linguistic territories, and European science had to reconcile them.

In 1958, Chevrolet introduced the Impala as a full-size automobile, choosing the name for its connotations of grace, speed, and African exoticism. The Chevrolet Impala became one of the best-selling American cars of all time, particularly dominant in the 1960s and 1970s, and has maintained continuous production into the twenty-first century. The Zulu word has thus been absorbed into American automotive culture so thoroughly that millions of people who have never seen the animal know the name through the car. Lowrider culture in the American Southwest adopted the Impala as a cultural touchstone — a 1964 Chevy Impala lowrider is an icon of Chicano and Black car culture. The antelope's name has traveled further than any antelope.