Much of the scholarly work on ǀXam was performed by Wilhelm Bleek, a German linguist of the 19th century, who studied a variety of ǀXam spoken at Achterveld, and (with Lucy Lloyd) another spoken at Strandberg and Katkop while working with ǁKabbo, Diaǃkwāin, ǀAǃkúṅta, ǃKweiten-ta-ǁKen, ǀHaṅǂkassʼō and other speakers.

[1] The surviving corpus of ǀXam comes from the stories told by and vocabulary recorded from these individuals in the Bleek and Lloyd Collection.

Compared to other Khoisan languages, there is little variation in rendering the name, though it is sometimes seen with the simple orthographic variant ǀKham, as well as a different grammatical form, ǀKhuai.

[3] A preliminary consonant inventory of ǀXam, including egressive stops, fricatives, and affricates as well as ingressive clicks, is listed below.

The five vowel sounds are noted as [i e a o u] and are found with nasalization [ĩ ẽ ã õ ũ], pharyngealization [ḭ ḛ a̰ o̰ ṵ], and glottalization [iˀ eˀ aˀ oˀ uˀ].