Kx'a

Kx'a, also called Ju–ǂHoan, is the click-language family of the San hunter-gatherers of the Kalahari and surrounding drylands of southern Africa, uniting the ǃKung, or Juu, dialect continuum with ǂ'Amkoe. Its speakers lived in small foraging bands, and the family had no written tradition.

Its click consonants include dental, alveolar, palatal, lateral and retroflex articulations, together with tone and nasalization; the reconstructed Proto-Juu possessed all five click positions. Kx'a was once grouped with the Tuu and Khoe families under the label Khoisan, but that unity is no longer accepted.

Before the Bantu expansion, click languages of this kind were spread far more widely across southern Africa; as Bantu- and Khoe-speaking herders advanced, Kx'a speech retreated toward the desert, where it remained the unwritten language of isolated foraging bands through the centuries after 1337.