The Kalahari Basin area: a 'Sprachbund' on the verge of extinction
The 
KBA project attempts to untangle some aspects of the complex linguistic and population
history of the southern African groups speaking languages other than from the Bantu family.
These are commonly subsumed under the unsubstantiated concept of a "Khoisan" family but might
turn out to share certain traits because of convergence processes within a geographical area.
The project will pursue a two-tiered approach, investigating southern Africa as a linguistic
area from a broad perspective as well as offering fine-scaled studies of individual contact
situations. The overall approach is a multidisciplinary one in involving linguists, molecular
anthropologists and social anthropologists.
The individual projects are:
| Project name | Principal investigators | |
| IP1 | A documentation and description of Shua (Kalahari East Khoe) | Bill McGregor (Aarhus University, Denmark) |
| IP2 | Salvage documentation of South African Khoekhoe and !Ui languages | Marten Mous / Christian Rapold (University of Leiden, Netherlands) |
| IP3 | Inheritance and contact in a language complex: the case of Taa varieties (Tuu family) | Tom Güldemann / Christfried Naumann (Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Germany) |
| IP4 | The Central Kalahari area with a focus on ?Hoan (Ju-?Hoan family): language contact and population genetics | Brigitte Pakendorf (MPI for Evolutionary Anthropology Leipzig, Germany) |
| IP5 | Kinship systems in southern African non-Bantu languages: documentation, comparison, and historical analysis | Alan Barnard / Gertrud Boden (University of Edinburgh, United Kingdom) |
| AP | The southwestern Kalahari Khoe languages of the G||ana and Naro groups | Hirosi Nakagawa, Hitomi Ono, Akira Takada (Japan) |