the quantity 'three'. This term is unique in its ambiguity among numeral terms used by African hunter-gatherer subsistence communities. Khwe has a large number of loan words from Afrikaans. Orthography 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. As Köhler's orthography was designed for academic purposes, his volumes were published in German and French, and therefore inaccessible to the Khwe themselves. Köhler never made an attempt to teach literacy to members of the community. 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. At the request and with the consultation of the Khwe, the orthography was revised and simplified by Matthias Brenzinger and Mathias Schladt between 1996 and 1997. 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. Kilian-Hatz also published a dictionary of Khwe, although this is written in the linguistic orthography which uses symbols from the International Phonetic Alphabet in place of the Latin script use for the applied orthography. The revised orthography has not been granted official status in Namibia. The Khwe language is not taught as a subject or used as a language of instruction in formal education, and few literacy materials exist. References External links Khwe basic lexicon at the Global Lexicostatistical Database ‖Xom Kyakyare Khwe: ǂAm Kuri Kxʼûî: Part one of a series of Buga and ǁAni Khwe oral testimonies Khoe languages Languages of Botswana Languages of South Africa