Click consonant
Click consonants, or clicks, are speech sounds that occur as consonants in many languages of Southern Africa and in three languages of East Africa. Examples familiar to English-speakers are the tut-tut or tsk! tsk! used to express disapproval or pity, the tchick! used to spur on a horse, and the clip-clop! sound children make with their tongue to imitate a horse trotting. However, these paralinguistic sounds in English are not full click consonants, as they only involve the front of the tongue, without the release of the back of the tongue that is required for clicks to combine with vowels and form syllables.
Anatomically, clicks are obstruents articulated with two closures in the mouth, one forward and one at the back. The enclosed pocket of air is rarefied by a sucking action of the tongue. The forward closure is then released, producing what may be the loudest consonants in the language, although in some languages such as Hadza and Sandawe, clicks can be more subtle and may even be mistaken for ejectives. The forward closure occurs at one of half a dozen places of articulation. The rear closure may be released simultaneously with the forward closure or after it; it may be silent, affricated or ejective. The consonant as a whole may also be nasalized, voiced, aspirated, glottalized etc.
Phonetics and IPA notation
Click consonants occur at six principal places of articulation. The International Phonetic Alphabet provides five letters for these places.- The easiest clicks for English speakers are the dental clicks written with. These are sharp squeaky sounds made by sucking on the front teeth. A simple dental click is used in English to express pity or to shame someone, or to call a cat or other animal, and is written tut! in British English and tsk! in American English. In many cultures around the Mediterranean a simple dental click is used for "no" in answer to a direct question. They are written with the letter c in Zulu and Xhosa.
- Next most familiar to English speakers are the lateral clicks, which are written with. They are also squeaky sounds, though less sharp than, made by sucking on the molars on either side of the mouth. A simple lateral click is made in English to get a horse moving, and is conventionally written tchick!. They are written with the letter x in Zulu and Xhosa.
- Then there are the bilabial clicks, written with. These are lip-smacking sounds, but often without the pursing of the lips found in a kiss, that occur in words in only a few languages.
- With the alveolar clicks, written with, the tip of the tongue is pulled down abruptly and forcefully from the roof of the mouth, sometimes using a lot of jaw motion, and making a hollow pop! like a cork being pulled from an empty bottle. Something like these sounds may be used for a 'clip-clop' sound as noted above. These sounds can be quite loud. They are written with the letter q in Zulu and Xhosa.
- The palatal clicks,, are made with a flat tongue that is pulled backward rather than downward, and are sharper cracking sounds than the clicks, like sharply snapped fingers. They are not found in Zulu but are very common in the San languages of southern Africa.
- Finally, the retroflex clicks are poorly known, being attested from only a single language, Central !Kung. The tongue is curled back in the mouth, and they are both fricative and hollow sounding, but descriptions of these sounds vary between sources. This may reflect dialect differences. They are perhaps most commonly written, but that is an ad hoc transcription. The expected IPA letter is , and the IPA supported the addition of that letter to Unicode.
Thus technically is not a consonant, but only one part of the articulation of a consonant, and one may speak of "ǂ-clicks" to mean any of the various click consonants that share the place of articulation. In practice, however, the simple letter has long been used as an abbreviation for, and in that role it is sometimes seen combined with diacritics for voicing, nasalization, etc. These differing transcription conventions may reflect differing theoretical analyses of the nature of click consonants, or attempts to address common misunderstandings of clicks.
Languages with clicks
Southern Africa
Clicks occur in all three Khoisan language families of southern Africa, where they may be the most numerous consonants. To a lesser extent they occur in three neighbouring groups of Bantu languages—which borrowed them, directly or indirectly, from Khoisan. In the southeast, in eastern South Africa, Eswatini, Lesotho, Zimbabwe and southern Mozambique, they were adopted from a Tuu language by the languages of the Nguni cluster, and spread from them in a reduced fashion to the Zulu-based pidgin Fanagalo, Sesotho, Tsonga, Ronga, the Mzimba dialect of Tumbuka and more recently to Ndau and urban varieties of Pedi, where the spread of clicks continues. The second point of transfer was near the Caprivi Strip and the Okavango River where, apparently, the Yeyi language borrowed the clicks from a West Kalahari Khoe language; a separate development led to a smaller click inventory in the neighbouring Mbukushu, Kwangali, Gciriku, Kuhane and Fwe languages in Angola, Namibia, Botswana and Zambia. These sounds occur not only in borrowed vocabulary, but have spread to native Bantu words as well, in the case of Nguni at least partially due to a type of word taboo called hlonipha. Some creolised varieties of Afrikaans, such as Oorlams, retain clicks in Khoekhoe words.East Africa
Three languages in East Africa use clicks: Sandawe and Hadza of Tanzania, and Dahalo, an endangered South Cushitic language of Kenya that has clicks in only a few dozen words. It is thought the latter may remain from an episode of language shift.Damin
The only non-African language known to have clicks as regular speech sounds is Damin, a ritual code once used by speakers of Lardil in Australia. In addition, one consonant in Damin is the egressive equivalent of a click, using the tongue to compress the air in the mouth for an outward "spurt".Use
Spread of clicks from loanwords
Once clicks are borrowed into a language as regular speech sounds, they may spread to native words, as has happened due to hlonipa word-taboo in the Nguni languages. In Gciriku, for example, the European loanword tomate appears as cumáte with a click, though it begins with a t in all neighbouring languages. It has also been argued that click phonemes have been adopted into some languages through the process of hlonipha, women refraining from saying certain words and sounds that were similar to the name of their husband, sometimes replacing local sounds by borrowing clicks from a nearby language.Marginal usage of clicks
Scattered clicks are found in ideophones and mimesis in other languages, such as Kongo, Mijikenda and Hadza . Ideophones often use phonemic distinctions not found in normal vocabulary.English and many other languages may use bare click releases in interjections, without an accompanying rear release or transition into a vowel, such as the dental "tsk-tsk" sound used to express disapproval, or the lateral tchick used with horses. In a number of languages ranging from the central Mediterranean to Iran, a bare dental click release accompanied by tipping the head upwards signifies "no". Libyan Arabic apparently has three such sounds. A voiceless nasal back-released velar click is used throughout Africa for backchanneling. This sound starts off as a typical click, but the action is reversed and it is the rear velar or uvular closure that is released, drawing in air from the throat and nasal passages.
Lexical clicks occasionally turn up elsewhere. In West Africa, clicks have been reported allophonically, and similarly in French and German, faint clicks have been recorded in rapid speech where consonants such as and overlap between words. In Rwanda, the sequence may be pronounced either with an epenthetic vowel,, or with a light bilabial click, —often by the same speaker.
Speakers of Gan Chinese produce flapped nasal clicks in nursery rhymes with varying degrees of competence, in the words for 'goose' and 'duck', both of which begin with in Gan. A speaker from Ningdu county produced the nursery rhyme as:
where the Gan onsets are all pronounced.
Such language games are apparently widespread in China. A Mandarin speaker from Beijing recited a similar rhyme, in which the word é 'goose' was pronounced with similar nasal clicks. Of five instances of the word in the rhyme, three were flapped and two had a simple release; three were released into the nasal sound, one was prenasalized, and in one the burst was in the middle of the nasal sound.
Occasionally other languages are claimed to have click sounds in general vocabulary. This is usually a misnomer for ejective consonants, which are found across much of the world.