In 2000, the meeting of the Working Group of Indigenous Minorities in South Africa (WIMSA) produced the Penduka Declaration on the Standardisation of Ju and Khoe Languages,[2] which recommends Khwe be classified as part of the Central Khoe-San family, a cluster language comprising Khwe, ǁAni and Buga.

[3] Khwe is the preferred spelling as recommended by the Penduka Declaration,[2] but the language is also referred to as Kxoe, Khoe-dam and Khwedam.

[5] Testimonies from living Khwe speakers note that their ancestors have come from the Tsodilo Hills, in the Okavango Delta, where they primarily used hunter-gatherer techniques for subsistence.

[5] Until the 1970s, the Khwe speaking population lived in areas that were inaccessible to most Westerners in remote parts of Namibia, Angola, Zambia, Botswana, and South Africa.

[5] The semantic broadening of word meanings has also permeated other parts of Khwe-speaking culture, such as food, animals, and other forms of naming that some argue have introduced nonconformity.

[6] While Khwe-speakers were in minimal contact with the outsiders until 1970, there was limited interaction between the Khwe and missionaries in early and mid-twentieth centuries.

[3] Specifically, Khwe speakers primarily live in the western Caprivi area in Namibia, however, the entirety of the Khoe population occupies a much larger geography.

Khwe speakers in the western Caprivi are somewhat distant, lexically, from other similar Khoe languages, such as Damara.

[8] The Khwe speakers' distribution in the greater Kavango-Zambezi region influenced clicks in Khoisan languages, some argue.

[7] The Khwe, and other Khoe language speaking peoples, resided in greater Southern Africa, prior to the great Bantu Migration, which occurred about 5,000 years ago.

[1] Noting this, there have been major forced migrations from government pressures that have influenced the contemporary distribution of Khwe speakers.

Verbs take tense-aspect-mood suffixes (TAMs), marking for causative, applicative, comitative, locative, passive, reflexive and reciprocal.

[18] In 1957, Oswin Köhler, founder of the Institut für Afrikanistik at the University of Cologne, designed an orthography of Khwe in which he published three volumes of texts and grammatical sketches, based on observations of language and culture made over 30 years of visits to Namibia.

[21] As Köhler's orthography was designed for academic purposes, his volumes were published in German and French, and therefore inaccessible to the Khwe themselves.

Attempts to teach the Khwe orthography to first language speakers were not made until 1996, by scholars of the institute who took up Köhler's work.

[22] A collection of Khwe folktales was published in 1999 by Christa Kilian-Hatz and David Naude, using the revised orthography along with interlinear and free translations.