The Sandawe are an indigenous ethnic group of Southeast Africa, based in the Chemba District kwamtoro ward of Dodoma Region in central Tanzania. In 2000, the Sandawe population was estimated to be 40,000.
The Sandawe language is a tonal language that uses click consonants, as do the Khoe languages of southern Africa.
The ethnic groups of Africa number in the thousands, with each ethnicity generally having their own language (or dialect of a language) and culture. The ethnolinguistic groups include various Afroasiatic, Khoisan, Niger-Congo, and Nilo-Saharan populations.
The official population count of the various ethnic groups in Africa is highly uncertain due to limited infrastructure to perform censuses, and due to rapid population growth. Some groups have alleged that there is deliberate misreporting in order to give selected ethnicities numerical superiority (as in the case of Nigeria's Hausa, Fulani, Yoruba, and Igbo peoples).
The Khoisan languages (/ˈkɔɪsɑːn/ KOY-sahn; also Khoesan or Khoesaan) are a number of African languages once classified together, originally by Joseph Greenberg. Khoisan is defined as those languages that have click consonants and do not belong to other African language families. For much of the 20th century, they were thought to be genealogically related to each other, but this is no longer accepted. They are now held to comprise three distinct language families and two language isolates.
All but two Khoisan languages are indigenous to southern Africa; these are classified into three language families. The Khoe family appears to have migrated to southern Africa not long before the Bantu expansion. Ethnically, their speakers are the Khoekhoe and the San (Bushmen). Two languages of eastern Africa, those of the Sandawe and Hadza, were originally also classified as Khoisan, although their speakers are ethnically neither Khoekhoe nor San.
Sandawe is a language spoken by about 60,000 Sandawe people in the Dodoma Region of Tanzania. Sandawe's use of click consonants, a rare feature shared with only two other languages of East Africa, Hadza and Dahalo, had been the basis of its classification as a member of the defunct Khoisan family of Southern Africa since Albert Drexel in the 1920s. It has been suggested, however, that Sandawe may be related to the Khoe family, regardless of the validity of Khoisan as a whole (Güldemann 2010). A discussion of the linguistic classification of Sandawe can be found in Sands (1998).
Language use is vigorous among both adults and children, with people in some areas monolingual. Sandawe has two dialects, northwest and southeast. Differences include speaking speed, vowel dropping, some word taboo, and minor lexical and grammatical differences. Some Alagwa and Kw'adza have shifted to Sandawe, and form now specific clans among them.
The Alagwa (Swahili: Waasi; Rangi: Vaasi; Iraqw: Alawa) are a Cushitic ethnic group mostly based in the Kondoa District (Alagwa: Ulàa) of the Dodoma Region in central Tanzania, an area well known for rock art. Smaller numbers of Alagwa reside in the Hanang district of the Manyara Region in Tanzania, as well. They speak the Alagwa language as a mother tongue, which belongs to the South Cushitic branch of the Afro-Asiatic family. In 2022, the Alagwa population was estimated to number 52,816 individuals, and Mous (2016) estimates the number of speakers to be slightly over 10,000.
Some of the Alagwa have mixed with communities of Gorowa, Sandawe, Datooga, and Rangi. Many Alagwa speak the Rangi language and the two groups have both influenced each other. Many of the Alagwa are Muslims, following from an extended period of interactions with Swahili traders in Kondoa in the 19th century.