Sandawe is a language spoken by about 60,000 Sandawe people in the Dodoma region of Tanzania's Rift Valley, remaining vigorous among both adults and children with some communities still monolingual. It is classified as a language isolate, though recent research has proposed a possible relationship to the Khoe family. Like Hadza, Sandawe uses click consonants, a feature shared among East African languages only with Hadza and Dahalo, and it carries a complex tonal system with two dialects, northwest and southeast, distinguished by speaking speed, vowel dropping and minor grammatical differences.
Facts
RegionSpoken in the Dodoma Region of Tanzania. 1 Speaker Count Proto-Language StatusSandawe was historically grouped with the now defunct Khoisan family. The strongest current proposal links it instead to the Khoe languages, though not enough correspondences exist yet to reconstruct a shared proto language. 1 Sources
1. Wikipedia: Sandawe Language
Wikimedia FoundationLead sentence 1, region clause
in the Dodoma Region of Tanzania
Lead sentence 1, speaker-count clause
about 60,000 Sandawe people
Classification section, paragraph 1, final clause
there are enough to suggest that the connection is real
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