[citation needed] Tindiga is from Swahili watindiga "people of the marsh grass" (from the large spring in Mangola) and kitindiga (their language).

[citation needed] Kangeju (pronounced Kangeyu) is an obsolete German name of unclear origin.

A few words link it with Oropom, which may itself be spurious; the numerals itchâme /it͡ʃʰaame/ "one" and piye /pie/ "two" suggest a connection with Kwʼadza, an extinct language of hunter-gatherers who may have had recently shifted to Cushitic.

A lexicostatistical proposal for Hadza as a member of the family, perhaps particularly close to Chadic,[5] was criticized by specialists of Hadza and Cushitic as more likely consisting of several layers of loanwords and some chance resemblances, due to insufficient regularity in sound correspondences and a lack of grammatical evidence for a relationship.

[6] George Starostin finds the hypothesis of a relationship of Hadza with Afroasiatic theoretically plausible, but that any demonstration of it by lexical comparison remains "almost by definition impossible", due to the reconstruction of Proto-Afroasiatic being still poorly developed.

[7] There are no dialects, though there is some regional vocabulary, especially Bantu loans, which are more numerous in the southern and western areas of high bilingualism.

Some of these words are historically derivable from clicks in initial positions (many appear to reflect lexicalized reduplication, for example, and some are due to prefixes), but others are opaque.

As in Sandawe, most medial clicks are glottalized, but not all: puche 'a spleen', tanche 'to aim', tacce 'a belt', minca 'to lick one's lips', laqo 'to trip someone', keqhe-na 'slow', penqhenqhe ~ peqeqhe 'to hurry', haqqa-ko 'a stone', shenqe 'to peer over', exekeke 'to listen', naxhi 'to be crowded', khaxxe 'to jump', binxo 'to carry kills under one's belt'.

Invariable nasal vowels, although uncommon, do occur, though not before consonants that have a place of articulation to assimilate to.

[citation needed] Consonants in shaded cells appear only in loanwords or are NC sequences, which do not appear to be single segments but are listed here to illustrate the orthography.

(Not illustrated are nasal–click sequences in the middle of words: aspirated nch, nqh, nxh and tenuis ngc, ngq, ngx.)

It is broadly similar to the orthographies of neighboring languages such as Swahili, Isanzu, Iraqw, and Sandawe.

The apostrophe, which is ubiquitous in transcription in the anthropological literature but causes problems with literacy, is not used: Glottal stop is indicated by vowel sequences (that is, /beʔe/ is written ⟨bee⟩, as in ⟨Hazabee⟩ /ɦadzabeʔe/ 'the Hadza'), which true vowel sequences are separated by y or w (that is, /pie/ 'two' is written ⟨piye⟩), though in some cases an h may be justified, and ejectives and glottalized clicks by gemination (apart from reduced ⟨dl⟩ instead of *ddl for /c𝼆ʼ/).

The ejectives are based on the voiced consonants, ⟨bb zz jj dl gg ggw⟩, because these are otherwise found mostly in borrowings and thus not common.

[citation needed] For more information, see [12] Hadza is a head-marking language in both clauses and noun phrases.

Reduplication of the initial syllable of a word, usually with tonic accent and a long vowel, is used to indicate 'just' (meaning either 'merely' or 'solely') and is quite common.

It occurs on both nouns and verbs, and reduplication can be used to emphasize other things, such as the habitual suffix -he- or the pluractional infix ⟨kV⟩.

They are marked by suffixes as follows: The feminine plural is used for mixed natural gender, as in Hazabee 'the Hadza'.

The masculine plural may trigger vowel harmony: dongobee 'zebras' (an individuated number), dungubii 'zebra bucks'.

Calling attention to a dead zebra, for example, uses the form hantayii (masculine hantayee, plural (rare) hantayetee and hantayitchii).

Hadza has several auxiliary verbs: sequential ka- and iya- ~ ya- 'and then', negative akhwa- 'not', and subjunctive i-.

In such cases the DO reduces to the form of the attributive suffix: -e (M.SG / F.PL) or -i (F.PL / M.SG); only context tells which combination of number and gender is intended.

Dorothea Bleek suggested piye 'two' might have a Bantu source; the closest locally in Nyaturu -βĩĩ.

Militarev notes similar forms to piye in Chadic languages, such as Hausa bíyúú 'two'.

They are (in the imperative singular): The words are somewhat generic: henqêe may be used for any spotted cat, hushuwee for any running ground bird.

"}In 2003 the press widely reported suggestions by Alec Knight and Joanna Mountain of Stanford University that the original human language may have had clicks.

The purported evidence for this is genetic: speakers of Juǀʼhoan and Hadza have the most divergent known mitochondrial DNA of any human populations, suggesting that they were the first, or at least among the first, surviving peoples to have split off the family tree.