Xhosa

The Xhosa are one of South Africa's largest ethnic groups, with about eight million speakers today. Their language belongs to the Nguni branch of Bantu languages and is famous for three types of click consonants: dental, lateral, and palatal. The name amaXhosa means 'people of Xhosa,' where ama- is a Bantu plural prefix. The root Xhosa is what historians and linguists have spent centuries trying to trace.

The most widely accepted origin traces the name to a Khoikhoi word meaning 'fierce' or 'angry men.' The Khoikhoi were the indigenous pastoral people of southern Africa who encountered southward-migrating Nguni Bantu speakers around the 14th and 15th centuries. External naming is common across African history: many ethnic labels began as descriptions coined by neighbors and then adopted as self-designations. The three click consonant types in Xhosa were borrowed from Khoikhoi and San phonology during this period of contact, and the name itself may have traveled the same channel.

A rival theory holds that Xhosa derives from a legendary ancestor chief called uXhosa, whose name may have had Khoikhoi roots of its own. The earliest reliable written records using 'Xhosa' appear in 18th-century Dutch and British colonial documents from the Eastern Cape. Missionary reports and colonial correspondence from the Cape Colony cemented the spelling. The Cape Frontier Wars, fought between 1779 and 1879, brought the name into sustained European documentation and into English-language print.

Xhosa entered English as both noun and adjective: a Xhosa speaker, Xhosa culture. Its spelling, with an initial X for a lateral click, makes it one of the few common English words with a click consonant. Nelson Mandela was a Xhosa speaker, born in 1918 to the Thembu royal family of the Eastern Cape. His Xhosa name, Rolihlahla, means 'troublemaker,' and his life proved the language carries the full weight of South African history.