Click consonant
From Freepedia
| Manners of articulation |
| Obstruent |
| Click |
| Plosive |
| Ejective |
| Implosive |
| Affricate |
| Fricative |
| Sibilant |
| Sonorant |
| Nasal |
| Flap/Tap |
| Trill |
| Approximant |
| Semivowel |
| Liquid |
| Vowel |
| Lateral |
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Clicks are stops produced with two articulatory closures in the oral cavity. The pocket of air enclosed between the two closures is rarefied by a "sucking" action of the tongue. The release of the more forward closure produces what in many cases are the loudest consonants in the language, although in some languages such as Hadza, clicks are more subtle and may even be mistaken for ejective stops. Clicks appear more stop-like or more affricate-like depending on their place of articulation: clicks involving an apical alveolar or laminal postalveolar closure are acoustically sharp like plain stops, while bilabial, dental and lateral clicks have an acoustically noisier sound, and sound more like affricates.
Clicks occur in all the Khoisan languages of southern Africa, and in several of the neighbouring Bantu languages, such as Nguni (Zulu, Xhosa, Swazi, Ndebele), Yeyi, and Sesotho, which borrowed them from Khoisan languages. Clicks also occur in Sandawe and Hadza, two languages of Tanzania traditionally classified as Khoisan, as well as in Dahalo, an endangered South Cushitic language of Kenya.
The only non-African language known to employ clicks as regular speech sounds is Damin, a secret ritual code used by speakers of Lardil in Australia. One of the clicks in Damin is actually an egressive click, formed as above, but using the tongue to compress the air in the mouth for an outward (egressive) "spurt". English and many other languages may use clicks in interjections, such as "tsk-tsk" or "gee-up".
As noted above, clicks necessarily involve two closures: an anterior one which is represented by the special click symbol in the IPA, and a posterior one which is usually velar but can also be uvular. This posterior articulation may be oral or nasal, voiced or voiceless, etc. (It's quite easy to pronounce a nasal click once you realise that while maintaining the double oral closure you're free to breathe through the nose.) Since the posterior articulation is most commonly velar (and can only be velar in most languages), only the place of the anterior articulation (called the "release") is normally mentioned, while only the manner of the posterior articulation (called the "accompaniment") is specified. Thus a "nasal dental click" means a click with a dental anterior articulation/release and a velar nasal posterior articulation/accompaniment.
There are numerous combinations of elements making up a click accompaniment, some of them quite daunting. These include voiceless, voiced, aspirate, breathy voiced, nasal, voiceless nasal, breathy voiced nasal, glottalized, voiceless nasal glottalized, affricate, ejective affricate, prevoiced, prenasalized, and others as well, including extremely complicated combinations such as a voiced velar click followed by voiceless affricated ejective, [g!kx], and a velar ejective click followed by uvular ejective, [k!’q’] (Ladefoged and Maddieson, 1996). This means that pentagraphs like gk!x’ are possible in a practical orthography. However, many of these combinations are consonant clusters rather than separate phonemes. The size of Khoisan click inventories ranges from as few as four for the Dahalo language of Kenya to dozens in the Northern and Southern Khoisan languages and up to 83 clicks (including 50 simple clicks) in !Xóõ (Ladefoged and Maddieson, 1996). In the latter language, over 70% of words begin with a click.
The Southern African Khoisan languages only permit root-initial clicks. Hadza, Sandawe, and several of the Bantu languages also allow clicks within roots, but in no language does a click close a syllable or end a word.
The five click releases with dedicated symbols in the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) are bilabial ʘ, dental ǀ, postalveolar ǂ, alveolar ǃ, and alveolar lateral ǁ. The alveolar and palatal releases are "abrupt"; that is, they are sharp popping sounds with little frication (turbulent airflow). The bilabial, dental, and lateral releases, on the other hand, are "noisy": they are longer, teeth-sucking sounds with turbulent airflow, and are sometimes called affricates. (They can, however, still have regular affricate accompaniments.) The apical releases, ǃ and ǁ, are sometimes called "grave", because their pitch is dominated by low frequencies; while the laminal releases, ǀ and ǂ, are sometimes called "acute", because they are dominated by high frequencies. Thus the alveolar ǃ sounds something like a cork pulled from a bottle (a low pitched pop), at least in Xhosa; while the dental ǀ is like English tsk! tsk!, a high pitched sucking on the incisors. The lateral clicks are pronounced by sucking on the molars of one or both sides. The bilabial ʘ is different than what many people associate with a kiss: the lips are pressed more-or-less flat together, as they are for a [p] or an [m], not rounded as they are for a [w].
There are a few less well attested releases, such as a noisy laminal denti-alveolar lateral release (Ⅲ [triple pipe] in an ad hoc transcription), which contrasts with an apical postalveolar lateral in Mangetti Dune !Kung; an abrupt sub-apical retroflex release <‼> in Angolan !Kung; and a "slapped" alveolar click [!¡] in Hadza and Sandawe, where the tongue slaps the bottom of the mouth after the release. (These distinctions may suffice for the Damin releases as well.) However, the Khoisan languages are poorly attested, and it is quite possible that, as they become better described, more click releases will be found.
When a full click consonant (that is, an accompaniment plus release) is transcribed, the accompaniment is written first: [ŋ͡ǀ]. The tie bar is not often used in practice, and when the accompaniment is a simple [k], it will sometimes be omitted as well.
While the SAMPA encoding for IPA into ASCII doesn't have symbols for transcribing clicks, the proposed X-SAMPA standard does: O\, |\, |\|\, =\, and !. Some instead suggest ||\, #\ or "\ for the alveolar lateral click. The Kirshenbaum system uses a different method: clicks are denoted by digraphs, with the click symbol "!" added to the stop homorganic to the release, but with the manner of the accompaniment. For example, /t!/ is a voiceless dental click, and /m!/ is a nasal bilabial click. (This is used in the literature on Damin.) However, the International Phonetic Association recommends using the IPA symbols in Unicode, or using the numbers which they have assigned to each symbol.
Contents |
Accompaniments
Examples of click accompaniments. Data is primarily from Ladefoged; see references at individual language articles.
Some Khoisan languages are typologically unusual in allowing mixed voicing in non-click consonant clusters, such as dt͡s’k͡x’, so it's not unexpected that they would allow mixed voicing in clicks as well.
There is ongoing discussion as to which of these are best analysed as consonant clusters, as in several cases this is not obvious. For example, some linguists feel that ejective clicks are not possible, and that those described as such are most likely clusters. In Ladefoged's analysis, if there is only a single segment, this is indicated by a single non-subscript letter for the accompaniment.
Of the languages below, !Xóõ is Southern Khoisan, Nama, Korana, and Gǀui are Central Khoisan, Zhuǀ’hõasi is Northern Khoisan, and ‡Hoan is unclassified. These languages are spoken primarily in Namibia and Botswana. (See List of Khoisan languages for classification.) Xhosa is a Bantu language of South Africa; Dahalo is a Cushitic language of Kenya; Hadza and Sandawe are spoken in Tanzania; and Damin was an initiation jargon in northern Australia.
The four Dahalo accompaniments occur only with a dental release. Damin has only a nasal accompaniment with its normal clicks, but has a voiceless unaspirated release for its egressive click.
| IPA | Alveolar release, plus: | Languages found in |
| [k!] | Voiceless unaspirated velar plosive | Damin, Gǀui, Hadza, ‡Hoan, Korana, Nama, Sandawe, Xhosa, !Xóõ, Zhuǀ’hõasi |
| [q!] | Voiceless unaspirated uvular plosive | Gǀui, ‡Hoan, !Xóõ |
| [k!ʰ] | Aspirated velar plosive | Gǀui, ‡Hoan, Korana, Nama, Xhosa, !Xóõ, Zhuǀ’hõasi |
| [q!ʰ] | Aspirated uvular plosive | Gǀui, ‡Hoan |
| [k!x] | Voiceless affricated velar plosive | !Xóõ, Zhuǀ’hõasi |
| [q!χ] | Voiceless affricated uvular plosive | Gǀui, ‡Hoan |
| [k!ˀ] | Voiceless unaspirated velar plosive and glottal stop | Korana, Nama, !Xóõ, Zhuǀ’hõasi |
| [k!ˀ, ŋˀk!] | Voiceless glottalized velar plosive (prenasalized between vowels) | Gǀui, ‡Hoan, Sandawe |
| [q!’] | Uvular ejective | Gǀui, ‡Hoan, !Xóõ |
| [g!] | Voiced velar plosive | Gǀui, ‡Hoan, !Xóõ, Zhuǀ’hõasi |
| [g!ɣ] | Voiced affricated velar plosive | Zhuǀ’hõasi |
| [g!, ŋg!] | Voiced velar plosive (prenasalized between vowels) | Sandawe |
| [(ɴ)ɢ!] | Voiced uvular plosive (usually prenasalized) | Gǀui, ‡Hoan, !Xóõ |
| [g̈!] | Breathy-voiced velar plosive | Xhosa |
| [ŋ!] | Voiced velar nasal | Dahalo, Damin, Gǀui, Hadza, ‡Hoan, Korana, Nama, Sandawe, Xhosa, !Xóõ, Zhuǀ’hõasi |
| [ŋ!ʷ] | Labialized voiced velar nasal | Dahalo |
| [ŋ̈!] | Breathy-voiced velar nasal | Xhosa |
| [ŋ̊!] | Voiceless velar nasal | Dahalo, !Xóõ |
| [ŋ̊!ʷ] | Labialized voiceless velar nasal | Dahalo |
| [ŋ̊!h] | Voiceless delayed-aspirated velar nasal | Gǀui, ‡Hoan, Korana, Nama, Zhuǀ’hõasi |
| [↓ŋ̊!ʰ] | Voiceless ingressive pulmonic nasal with delayed aspiration | !Xóõ |
| [ŋ̊!ˀ] | Voiceless velar nasal and glottal stop | Hadza |
| [ʔŋ!] | Preglottalized velar nasal | ‡Hoan, !Xóõ |
| [ŋŋ̊!ʰ] | Voiced velar nasal followed by voiceless aspirated velar nasal | Zhuǀ’hõasi |
| [g!h] | Voiced velar plosive followed by aspiration | !Xóõ, Zhuǀ’hõasi |
| [ɢ!h] | Voiced uvular plosive, followed by aspiration | !Xóõ |
| [gk!x] | Voiced velar plosive followed by voiceless velar fricative | !Xóõ |
| [k!x’] | Affricated velar ejective | Korana, Zhuǀ’hõasi |
| [q!χ’] | Affricated uvular ejective | Gǀui, ‡Hoan |
| [g!kx’] | Voiced velar plosive followed by voiceless affricated ejective | Zhuǀ’hõasi |
| [k!’q’] | Voiceless velar ejective, followed by uvular ejective | !Xóõ |
| [g!q’] | Voiced velar plosive, followed by uvular ejective | !Xóõ |
Releases
Inventories of click releases
There are seven known click releases, not counting slapped or egressive clicks. No single language is known to have more than five.
| Click release inventory | Languages | |
| dental ǀ only | Dahalo | |
| alveolar ǃ only | seSotho | |
| 3 releases, ǀ, ǃ, ǁ | Sandawe, Hadza, Xhosa, Zulu | (in Hadza and sometimes Sandawe, ! is "slapped") |
| 4 releases, ǀ, ǂ, ǃ, ǁ | Korana, Nama, Yeyi, Zhuǀ’hõasi | |
| 4 releases, ǀ, ǂ, ǃ˞, ǁ | !Kung (Angolan) | |
| 5 releases, ʘ, ǀ, ǂ, ǃ, ǁ | ‡Hõã, Nǀu, ǀXam, !Xóõ | |
| 5 releases, ǀ, ǂ, ǃ, ǁ, ǁ̪ | !Kung (Mangetti Dune) | |
| 5 releases, ʘ, ʘ↑, ǀ, ǃ, ǃ˞ | Damin |
Names found in the literature
The oldest terms for the click releases, such as in Bleek 1911, are closer to modern terminology than much of what was published in between. Here are the terms used in some of the main references.
| Click release | Bantu letters | Also known as: | |
| ǀ dental | c | dental affricative/affricated/with friction; alveolar affricated; denti-alveolar; apico-lamino-dental | |
| ǂ palatal | palato-alveolar; alveolar; alveolar instantaneous; denti-alveolar implosive | ||
| ǃ alveolar | q | cerebral; alveolar implosive; palato-alveolar; palato-alveolar instantaneous; palatal; palatal retroflex; apico-palatal | |
| ǁ lateral | x | lateral affricative/with friction; alveolar lateral affricated; post-alveolar lateral; lateral apico-alveo-palatal |
References
Ladefoged, Peter and Ian Maddieson. The Sounds of the World's Languages. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers Ltd. 1996.
