Ju, also called !Kung or !Xun, is a dialect continuum of two or three closely related languages spoken by the !Kung people across Namibia, Angola, Botswana and South Africa. Together with the separate ǂʼAmkoe language, it makes up the Kx'a language family. Roughly 77,000 people spoke a Ju variety as of 2015, including about 9,000 in Namibia, 3,700 in South Africa, 2,000 in Botswana and 1,000 in Angola, the last figure down from about 8,000 in 1975. The languages are known for extremely complex sound inventories, among the largest consonant and vowel systems documented anywhere in the world, built in part from an elaborate set of click consonants, and are written in a Latin alphabet extended with click letters.
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