Audio
The Bleek and Lloyd collection survives as a silent archive. A tantalising letter written by Felix von Luschan when Lucy Lloyd was living in Berlin in the first few years of the 20th century suggests that he made a recording of Lucy Lloyd speaking |xam, but despite the efforts of several colleagues we have not been able to track this down. Dorothea, however, did make recordings on wax cylinders, many of them stored at Iziko SAM and in the University of Cape Town’s College of Music. Most of these are degraded and none has yielded much information. Lucy Lloyd recorded music notations for songs that her |xam and !kun instructors sang for her and Nina Liebenberg has played some of these on a piano. No one alive has heard |xam spoken and while linguists in the 1990s and early 2000s recorded several surviving speakers speaking a related language, N|uu, many of the tones had already been lost.
This site includes several audio and audio-visual files
Many other videos and audio files of contemporary speakers will join this website in time.
