Casting a Wider Net over Nǁng: The Older Archival Resources

Nǁng is a moribund language complex that is a member of the Tuu family and used to be spoken widely across the southern portion of the Kalahari in the north of South Africa. While its modern linguistic remnants have been studied intensively, there are nevertheless many gaps in our knowledge about Nǁng. This article surveys the older records that began to be collected in the second half of the nineteenth century, arguing that these can inform our modern analysis of the linguistic and nonlinguistic data and complement our overall perception of this extinct ethnolinguistic group and its wider geographical and historical context.