A !Xóõ Dictionary

!Xóõ is the last member of the family of Southern Bushman languages. It is spoken in a number of varieties in southwestern Botswana, in the Ghanzi and Kgalagadi Districts and in the Aminuis Reserve in Namibia.
This Dictionary has its origins in a 1300-word database which was assembled a number of years ago for a phonetic and phonological analysis of !Xóõ and for comparative work. The original list was not representative of the language because it only contained examples of words necessary to conduct a linguistic analysis of phonetic, phonological and relevant syntactic forms; it also included the words of the 200 word Swadesh list for comparative studies. Words were added haphazardly to this list in the course of further research and as my learning of the language progressed, but it was only in the last four years that I made a concerted effort to record as many lexical items as possible and to begin the serious compilation of a dictionary of the language. There were a number of reasons for this change of focus. Perhaps the most important of these was the realisation that the language is threatened: a great deal of the cultural knowledge it conveys is not being learned by the younger generation which means that many lexical items will not survive beyond the present generation of informed speakers.