Clicks on the fringes of the Kalahari Basin

Clicks are a typical feature of the Kalahari linguistic area but their patterning on the fringes of this area is not so well-known. Clicks have been borrowed into Bantu languages multiple times (e.g. Yeyi, Xhosa, Ndau), and also lost multiple times (e.g. Fwe, Sowetan Zulu, Old Ngoni). The number of contrastive clicks and the number of lexical items with clicks tends to be low in the Bantu languages of the fringe. Relatively rare linguistic phenomena in the fringe may help define a linguistic area and inform patterns seen in the core