Hottentot (British and South African English ) is a term that was historically used to refer to the Khoekhoe, indigenous nomadic pastoralists of South Africa. The term has also been used to refer to the non-Bantu-speaking indigenous population as a whole, now collectively known as the Khoisan. Use of the term Hottentot is now deprecated and is offensive, the preferred name for the non-Bantu speaking indigenous people of the Western Cape area being Khoi, Khoekhoe (formerly Khoikhoi). Etymology Hottentot originated among the "old Dutch" settlers of the Dutch Cape Colony run by United East India Company (VOC), who arrived in the region in the 1650s, and it entered English usage from Dutch in the seventeenth century. However, no definitive Dutch etymology for the term is known. A widely claimed etymology is from a supposed Dutch expression equivalent to "stammerer, stutterer", applied to the Khoikhoi on account of the distinctive click consonants in their languages. There is, however, no earlier attestation of a word hottentot to support this theory. An alternative possibility is that the name derived from an overheard term in chants accompanying Khoikhoi or San dances, but seventeenth-century transcriptions of such chants offer no conclusive evidence for this. An early Anglicisation of the term is recorded as hodmandod in the years around 1700. The reduced Afrikaans/Dutch form hotnot has also been borrowed into South African English as a derogatory term for black people, including Cape Coloureds. Usage as an ethnic term In seventeenth-century Dutch, Hottentot was at times used to denote all black people (synonymously with Kaffir), but at least some speakers were careful to use the term Hottentot to denote what they thought of as a race distinct from the supposedly darker-skinned people referred to as Kaffirs, but the term Kaffir was also used against Cape Coloureds and Khoisans. This distinction between the non-Bantu "Cape Blacks" or "Cape Coloureds" and the Bantu was noted as early as 1684 by the French anthropologist François Bernier. The idea that Hottentot referred strictly to the non-Bantu peoples of southern Africa was well embedded in colonial scholarly thought by the end of the eighteenth century. The main meaning of Hottentot as an ethnic term in the 19th and the 20th centuries has therefore been to denote the Khoikhoi people specifically. However, Hottentot also continued to be used through the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries in a wider sense, to include all of