Click consonant

Template:Short description Template:More citations needed Template:Use dmy dates Template:Infobox symbol Template:Contains special characters 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 (British spelling) or tsk! tsk! (American spelling) used to express disapproval or pity (IPA Template:IPA), the tchick! used to spur on a horse (IPA Template:IPA), and the clip-clop! sound children make with their tongue to imitate a horse trotting (IPA Template:IPA). 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 (points of contact) in the mouth, one forward and one at the back. The enclosed pocket of air is rarefied by a sucking action of the tongue (in technical terminology, clicks have a lingual ingressive airstream mechanism). The forward closure is then released,<ref group=note>This is the case for all clicks used as consonants in words. Paralinguistically, however, there are other methods of making clicks: under the tongue or as above but by releasing the rear occlusion first. See #Places of articulation.</ref> 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.

Phonetics and IPA notation

Click consonants occur at six principal places of articulation. The International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) provides five letters for these places (there is as yet no dedicated symbol for the sixth).

• The easiest clicks for English speakers are the dental clicks written with Template:Angbr IPA. These are sharp (high-pitched) 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 Template:Angbr IPA. They are also squeaky sounds, though less sharp than Template:IPA, made by sucking on the molars on either side (or both sides) 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 Template:Angbr IPA. 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.

The above clicks sound like affricates, in that they involve a lot of friction. The next two families of clicks are more abrupt sounds that do not have this friction.

• With the alveolar clicks, written with Template:Angbr IPA, 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, Template:Angbr IPA, are made with a flat tongue that is pulled backward rather than downward, and are sharper cracking sounds than the Template:IPA 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 Template:Angbr IPA, but that is an ad hoc transcription. The expected IPA letter is Template:Angbr IPA (Template:Angbr IPA with retroflex tail), and the IPA supported the addition of that letter to Unicode.

Technically, these IPA letters transcribe only the forward articulation of the click, not the entire consonant. As the Handbook states,<ref>IPA Handbook, p. 10</ref> Template:Blockquote Thus technically Template:IPA 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 Template:IPA place of articulation.<ref>This can be convenient, as different authorities call the ǂ-clicks different things, so while it is unambiguous to call them "ǂ-clicks", it can be confusing to refer to them with terms like 'palatal', 'palato-alveolar' or 'alveolar', all of which have been used for both the sharp, flat-sounding ǂ-clicks and for the hollow-sounding ǃ-clicks.</ref> In practice, however, the simple letter Template:Angbr IPA has long been used as an abbreviation for Template:IPA, and in that role it is sometimes seen combined with diacritics for voicing (e.g. Template:Angbr IPA for Template:IPA), nasalization (e.g. Template:Angbr IPA for Template:IPA), 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 (or languages) by the languages of the Nguni cluster (especially Zulu, Xhosa and Phuthi, but also to a lesser extent Swazi and Ndebele), 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.<ref>Derek Nurse & Gérard Philippson (2003) The Bantu languages, pp 31–32</ref> 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 (egressive) "spurt".<ref>Template:Cite web</ref><ref>Template:Cite web</ref>

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 (tomato) appears as cumáte with a click Template:IPA, 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.<ref>Gunnink, Hilde. "The adoption and proliferation of clicks in Bantu languages: the role of hlonipha revisited." South African Journal of African Languages 43, no. 3 (2023): 216–225.</ref>

Marginal usage of clicks

Scattered clicks are found in ideophones and mimesis in other languages, such as Kongo Template:IPA, Mijikenda Template:IPA and Hadza Template:IPA (Hadza does not otherwise have labial clicks). 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,<ref>Including Armenian, Bulgarian, Greek, Levantine Arabic, Maltese, Persian, Romanian, Sicilian, Catalan, Turkish, and occasionally in French.</ref> a bare dental click release accompanied by tipping the head upwards signifies "no". Libyan Arabic apparently has three such sounds.<ref>Template:Cite web</ref> A voiceless nasal back-released velar click Template:IPA 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 Template:IPA and Template:IPA overlap between words.<ref name="germ">Template:Cite conference</ref> In Rwanda, the sequence Template:IPA may be pronounced either with an epenthetic vowel, Template:IPA, or with a light bilabial click, Template:IPA—often by the same speaker.

Speakers of Gan Chinese from Ningdu county, as well as speakers of Mandarin from Beijing and Jilin and presumably people from other parts of the country, produce flapped nasal clicks in nursery rhymes with varying degrees of competence, in the words for 'goose' and 'duck', both of which begin with Template:IPA in Gan and until recently began with Template:IPA in Mandarin as well. In Gan, the nursery rhyme is,

Template:IPA 天上一隻鵝 'a goose in the sky'

Template:IPA 地下一隻鴨 'a duck on the ground'

Template:IPA 鵝生鵝蛋鵝孵鵝 'a goose lays a goose egg, a goose hatches a goose'

Template:IPA 鴨生鴨蛋鴨孵鴨 'a duck lays a duck egg, a duck hatches a duck'

where the Template:IPA onsets are all pronounced Template:IPA.<ref>Geoffrey Nathan, 'Clicks in a Chinese Nursery Rhyme', JIPA (2001) 31/2.</ref>

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.

Position in word

Template:See also For the most part, the Southern African Khoisan languages only use root-initial clicks.<ref group="note">Exceptions occurs in words borrowed from Bantu languages, which may have click in the middle.</ref> Hadza, Sandawe and several Bantu languages also allow syllable-initial clicks within roots. In no language does a click close a syllable or end a word, but since the languages of the world that happen to have clicks consist mostly of CV syllables and allow at most only a limited set of consonants (such as a nasal or a glottal stop) to close a syllable or end a word, most consonants share the distribution of clicks in these languages.

Number of click-types in languages

Most languages of the Khoesan families (Tuu, Kxʼa and Khoe) have four click types: Template:IPA} or variants thereof, though a few have three or five, the last supplemented with either bilabial Template:IPA} or retroflex Template:IPA}. Hadza and Sandawe in Tanzania have three, Template:IPA}. Yeyi is the only Bantu language with four, Template:IPA}, while Xhosa and Zulu have three, Template:IPA}, and most other Bantu languages with clicks have fewer.

Types of clicks

Template:AnchorLike other consonants, clicks can be described using four parameters: place of articulation, manner of articulation, phonation (including glottalisation) and airstream mechanism. As noted above, clicks necessarily involve at least two closures, which in some cases operate partially independently: an anterior articulation traditionally represented by the special click symbol in the IPA—and a posterior articulation traditionally transcribed for convenience as oral or nasal, voiced or voiceless, though such features actually apply to the entire consonant. The literature also describes a contrast between velar and uvular rear articulations for some languages.

In some languages that have been reported to make this distinction, such as Nǁng, all clicks have a uvular rear closure, and the clicks explicitly described as uvular are in fact cases where the uvular closure is independently audible: contours of a click into a pulmonic or ejective component, in which the click has two release bursts, the forward (click-type) and then the rearward (uvular) component. "Velar" clicks in these languages have only a single release burst, that of the forward release, and the release of the rear articulation isn't audible. However, in other languages all clicks are velar, and a few languages, such as Taa, have a true velar–uvular distinction that depends on the place rather than the timing of rear articulation and that is audible in the quality of the vowel.

Regardless, in most of the literature the stated place of the click is the anterior articulation (called the release or influx), whereas the manner is ascribed to the posterior articulation (called the accompaniment or efflux). The anterior articulation defines the click type and is written with the IPA letter for the click (dental Template:Angbr IPA, alveolar Template:Angbr IPA, etc.), whereas the traditional term 'accompaniment' conflates the categories of manner (nasal, affricated), phonation (voiced, aspirated, breathy voiced, glottalised), as well as any change in the airstream with the release of the posterior articulation (pulmonic, ejective), all of which are transcribed with additional letters or diacritics, as in the nasal alveolar click, Template:Angbr IPA or Template:Angbr IPA or—to take an extreme example—the voiced (uvular) ejective alveolar click, Template:Angbr IPA.

The size of click inventories ranges from as few as three (in Sesotho) or four (in Dahalo), to dozens in the Kxʼa and Tuu (Northern and Southern Khoisan) languages. Taa, the last vibrant language in the latter family, has 45 to 115 click phonemes, depending on analysis (clusters vs. contours), and over 70% of words in the dictionary of this language begin with a click.<ref>L&M 1996, p 246</ref>

Clicks appear more stop-like (sharp/abrupt) or affricate-like (noisy) depending on their place of articulation: In southern Africa, clicks involving an apical alveolar or laminal postalveolar closure are acoustically abrupt and sharp, like stops, whereas labial, dental and lateral clicks typically have longer and acoustically noisier click types that are superficially more like affricates. In East Africa, however, the alveolar clicks tend to be flapped, whereas the lateral clicks tend to be more sharp.

Transcription

Template:Further The five click places of articulation with dedicated symbols in the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) are labial Template:IPA, dental Template:IPA, palatal ("palato-alveolar") Template:IPA, (post)alveolar ("retroflex") Template:IPA and lateral Template:IPA. In most languages, the alveolar and palatal types are abrupt; that is, they are sharp popping sounds with little frication (turbulent airflow). The labial, dental and lateral types, on the other hand, are typically noisy: they are longer, lip- or tooth-sucking sounds with turbulent airflow, and are sometimes called affricates. (This applies to the forward articulation; both may also have either an affricate or non-affricate rear articulation as well.) The apical places, Template:IPA and Template:IPA, are sometimes called "grave", because their pitch is dominated by low frequencies; whereas the laminal places, Template:IPA and Template:IPA, are sometimes called "acute", because they are dominated by high frequencies. (At least in the Nǁng language and Juǀʼhoan, this is associated with a difference in the placement of the rear articulation: "grave" clicks are uvular, whereas "acute" clicks are pharyngeal.) Thus the alveolar click Template:IPA sounds something like a cork pulled from a bottle (a low-pitch pop), at least in Xhosa; whereas the dental click Template:IPA 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 labial click Template:IPA is different from what many people associate with a kiss: the lips are pressed more-or-less flat together, as they are for a Template:IPA or an Template:IPA, not rounded as they are for a Template:IPA.

The most populous languages with clicks, Zulu and Xhosa, use the letters c, q, x, by themselves and in digraphs, to write click consonants. Most Khoisan languages, on the other hand (with the notable exceptions of Naro and Sandawe), use a more iconic system based on the pipe Template:Angbr. (The exclamation point for the "retroflex" click was originally a pipe with a subscript dot, along the lines of ṭ, ḍ, ṇ used to transcribe the retroflex consonants of India.) There are also two main conventions for the second letter of the digraph as well: voicing may be written with g and uvular affrication with x, or voicing with d and affrication with g (a convention of Afrikaans). In two orthographies of Juǀʼhoan, for example, voiced Template:IPA is written g! or dq, and Template:IPA !x or qg. In languages without Template:IPA, such as Zulu, Template:IPA may be written gq.

Competing orthographies

	labial	laminal		apical		subapical
		dental	palatal	alveolar	lateral	retroflex
Lepsius (1855)		Template:IPA	Template:IPA	Template:IPA	Template:IPA
IPA (1921)		Template:IPA	Template:IPATemplate:Ref	Template:IPA	Template:IPA
Doke (1926)			🡣			Template:IPA
Beach (1938)	Template:IPA		Template:IPA
Bantuist	Template:IPA	Template:IPA	Template:IPA Template:Ref	Template:IPA	Template:IPA
IPA (1989)	Template:IPA	Template:IPA	Template:IPA	Template:IPA	Template:IPA	Template:IPA

1. Template:Note Template:Angbr IPA was proposed as the IPA letter for a palatal click by Daniel Jones, but in his writing he called it 'velar', which was evidently misunderstood by other phoneticians. A replacement of Template:Angbr was proposed by Clement Doke,<ref>Clement M Doke, 1926 (1969), The phonetics of the Zulu language. Johannesburg: University of the Witwatersrand Press</ref> and of Template:Angbr IPA by Beach.<ref>Douglas Martyn Beach, 1938, The phonetics of the Hottentot language. W. Heffer & sons. ltd.</ref> (The former is not supported by Unicode, and is here substituted with an arrow.) Doke and Beach used additional or modified letters for voiced and nasal clicks, but these did not catch on.
2. Template:Note The labial and palatal clicks do not occur in written Bantu languages. However, the palatal clicks have been romanised in Naron, Juǀʼhõasi and !Xun,Template:Which where they have been written Template:Angbr, Template:Angbr and Template:Angbr, respectively. In the 19th century, they were sometimes written Template:Angbr, which might be source of the Doke letter Template:Angbr.

There are a few less-well-attested articulations. A reported subapical retroflex articulation Template:Angbr IPA in Grootfontein !Kung<ref group=note>Template:Angbr (a triple pipe) in Doke (1954) and Cole (1966) is an ad hoc phonetic pipe letter for Doke's orthographic click letter Template:Angbr.</ref> turns out to be alveolar with lateral release, Template:Angbr IPA; Ekoka !Kung has a fricated alveolar click with an s-like release, provisionally transcribed Template:Angbr IPA; and Sandawe has a "slapped" alveolar click, provisionally transcribed Template:Angbr IPA (in turn, the lateral clicks in Sandawe are more abrupt and less noisy than in southern Africa). However, the Khoisan languages are poorly attested, and it is quite possible that, as they become better described, more click articulations will be found.

Formerly when a click consonant was transcribed, two symbols were used, one for each articulation, and connected with a tie bar. This is because a click such as Template:IPA was analysed as a voiced uvular rear articulation Template:IPA pronounced simultaneously with the forward ingressive release Template:IPA. The symbols may be written in either order, depending on the analysis: Template:Angbr IPA or Template:Angbr IPA. However, a tie bar was not often used in practice, and when the manner is tenuis (a simple Template:IPA), it was often omitted as well. That is, Template:Angbr IPA = Template:Angbr IPA = Template:Angbr IPA = Template:Angbr IPA = Template:Angbr IPA. Regardless, elements that do not overlap with the forward release are usually written according to their temporal order: Prenasalisation is always written first (Template:Angbr IPA = Template:Angbr IPA = Template:Angbr IPA), and the non-lingual part of a contour is always written second (Template:Angbr IPA = Template:Angbr IPA = Template:Angbr IPA).

However, it is common to analyse clicks as simplex segments, despite the fact that the front and rear articulations are independent, and to use diacritics to indicate the rear articulation and the accompaniment. At first this tended to be Template:Angbr IPA for Template:Angbr IPA, based on the belief that the rear articulation was velar; but as it has become clear that the rear articulation is often uvular or even pharyngeal even when there is no velar–uvular contrast, voicing and nasalisation diacritics more in keeping with the IPA have started to appear: Template:Angbr IPA for Template:Angbr IPA.

Variation in the transcription of accompaniments

	Tenuis	Aspirated	Voiced	Nasal	Delayed ("uvular")	True uvular
Tie bars	Template:IPA	Template:IPA	Template:IPA	Template:IPA	Template:IPA	Template:IPA etc.
	Template:IPA	Template:IPA	Template:IPA	Template:IPA	Template:IPA	Template:IPA etc.
Digraphs	Template:IPA	Template:IPA	Template:IPA	Template:IPA	Template:IPA	Template:IPA etc.
Superscripts	Template:IPA	Template:IPA	Template:IPA	Template:IPA	Template:IPA	Template:IPA etc.
Diacritics	Template:IPA	Template:IPA	Template:IPA	Template:IPA	NA	NA

In practical orthography, the voicing or nasalisation is sometimes given the anterior place of articulation: dc for Template:IPA and mʘ for Template:IPA, for example.

In the literature on Damin, the clicks are transcribed by adding Template:Angbr to the homorganic nasal: Template:Angbr.

Places of articulation

Places of articulation are often called click types, releases, or influxes, though 'release' is also used for the accompaniment/efflux. There are seven or eight known places of articulation, not counting slapped or egressive clicks. These are (bi)labial affricated Template:IPA, or "bilabial"; laminal denti-alveolar affricated Template:IPA, or "dental"; apical (post)alveolar plosive Template:IPA, or "alveolar"; laminal palatal plosive Template:IPA, or "palatal"; laminal palatal affricated Template:IPA (known only from Ekoka !Kung); subapical postalveolar Template:IPA, or "retroflex" (only known from Central !Kung and possibly Damin); and apical (post)alveolar lateral Template:IPA, or "lateral".

Place of articulation of initial release<ref>Click releases are not in themselves consonants (segments). To transcribe a click consonant, a second IPA letter is needed for the rear place of articulation, as in Template:Angbr IPA or Template:Angbr IPA</ref>

Labial	Dental	Alveolar	Slapped	Retroflex	Domed	Palatal	Lateral	Linguolabial	Velar
Template:IPA	Template:IPA	Template:IPA	Template:IPA	Template:IPA	Template:IPA (Template:IPA)	Template:IPA	Template:IPA	Template:IPA	Template:IPA
			(allophonic)					(paralexical only)

Languages illustrating each of these articulations are listed below. Given the poor state of documentation of Khoisan languages, it is quite possible that additional places of articulation will turn up. No language is known to contrast more than five.

Click place inventory	Languages	Notes
1 release, variable Template:IPA	Dahalo	Various nasal clicks only.
1 release, variable Template:IPA	Sotho, Swazi	In Sotho the clicks tend to be alveolar, in Swazi dental.
1 release, variable Template:IPA	Fwe, Gciriku	Tend to be dental.
3 releases, Template:IPA, Template:IPA, Template:IPA	Kwadi	Template:IPA and Template:IPA not found with all manners, but these may be accidental gaps, as Kwadi is poorly attested
3 releases, Template:IPA, Template:IPA, Template:IPA	Sandawe, Hadza, Xhosa, Zulu	In Sandawe, Template:IPA is often "slapped" Template:IPA.
3–4 releases, Template:IPA, Template:IPA, (Template:IPA,) Template:IPA	ǁXegwi	Template:IPA reacquired in loans
4 releases, Template:IPA, Template:IPA, Template:IPA, Template:IPA	Korana, Khoekhoe, Yeyi, Juǀʼhoan
4 releases, Template:IPA, Template:IPA, Template:IPA, Template:IPA	Ekoka !Kung
5 releases, Template:IPA, Template:IPA, Template:IPA, Template:IPA, Template:IPA	ǂHõã, Nǀu, ǀXam, Taa
5 releases, Template:IPA, Template:IPA, Template:IPA, Template:IPA, Template:IPA	Grootfontein !Kung
5 releases, Template:IPA, Template:IPA, Template:IPA, Template:IPA, Template:IPA	Damin	Aside from Template:IPA, which is not technically a click, all are nasal.

Extra-linguistically, Coatlán Zapotec of Mexico uses a linguolabial click, Template:IPA, as mimesis for a pig drinking water,<ref name="Azcona">Rosemary Beam de Azcona, Sound Symbolism. Available at http://www.linguistics.berkeley.edu/~rosemary/55-fall2003-onomatopoeia.pdf Template:Webarchive</ref> and several languages, such as Wolof, use a velar click Template:IPA, long judged to be physically impossible, for backchanneling and to express approval.<ref>Lenore Grenoble (2014) "Verbal gestures: Toward a field-based approach to language description". In Plungian et al. (eds.), Language. Constants. Variables: In memory of A. E. Kibrik, 105–118. Aleteija: Saint Petersburg.</ref> An extended dental click with lip pursing or compression ("sucking-teeth"), variable in sound and sometimes described as intermediate between Template:IPA and Template:IPA, is found across West Africa, the Caribbean and into the United States.

The exact place of the alveolar clicks varies between languages. The lateral, for example, is alveolar in Khoekhoe but postalveolar or even palatal in Sandawe; the central is alveolar in Nǀuu but postalveolar in Juǀʼhoan.<ref>Amanda Miller (2011) "The Representation of Clicks", The Blackwell Companion to Phonology.</ref>

Names found in the literature

The terms for the click types were originally developed by Bleek in 1862.<ref>Wilhelm Bleek (1862) A Comparative Grammar of South African Languages, vol. 1, pp. 12–13</ref> Since then there has been some conflicting variation. However, apart from "cerebral" (retroflex), which was found to be an inaccurate label when true retroflex clicks were discovered, Bleek's terms are still considered normative today. Here are the terms used in some of the main references.

Names in the literature

Click type	Bleek (1862)	Doke (1926)	IPA (1928)	Beach (1938)	IPA (1949)	IPA (1989)	Unicode	Miller et al. (2009)<ref>Miller, Brugman, Sands, Namaseb, Exter & Collins (2009) Differences in airstream and posterior place of articulation among Nǀuu clicks, Journal of the International Phonetic Association 39, 129–161.</ref>	Vossen (2013)<ref>Rainer Vossen (2013) Introduction, The Khoesan Languages, Routledge</ref>	other
Template:IPA	dental	dental	dental	dental affricative	dental	dental	dental	denti-pharyngeal	dental	alveolar affricated; denti-alveolar; apico-lamino-dental
Template:IPA	cerebral	palato-alveolar	cerebral	alveolar implosive	retroflex	(post-)alveolar	retroflex	central alveo-uvular	alveolar	palatal; palatal retroflex; apico-palatal
Template:IPA	lateral	lateral	alveolar lateral	lateral affricative	lateral	(alveolar) lateral	lateral	lateral alveo-uvular	lateral-alveolar	post-alveolar lateral; lateral apico-alveo-palatal
Template:IPA	palatal	alveolar	velar	denti-alveolar implosive	velar	palatoalveolar	alveolar	palato-pharyngeal	palatal	alveolar instantaneous; dental
Template:IPA						bilabial	bilabial	labio-uvular	bilabial	labial

The dental, lateral and bilabial clicks are rarely confused, but the palatal and alveolar clicks frequently have conflicting names in older literature, and non-standard terminology is fossilized in Unicode. However, since Ladefoged & Traill (1984) clarified the places of articulation, the terms listed under Vosser (2013) in the table above have become standard, apart from such details as whether in a particular language Template:IPA and Template:IPA are alveolar or postalveolar, or whether the rear articulation is velar, uvular or pharyngeal, which again varies between languages (or may even be contrastive within a language).

Manners of articulation

Template:Main Click manners are often called click accompaniments or effluxes, but both terms have met with objections on theoretical grounds.

There is a great variety of click manners, both simplex and complex, the latter variously analysed as consonant clusters or contours. With so few click languages, and so little study of them, it is also unclear to what extent clicks in different languages are equivalent. For example, the Template:IPA of Khoekhoe, Template:IPA of Sandawe and Template:IPA of Hadza may be essentially the same phone; no language distinguishes them, and the differences in transcription may have more to do with the approach of the linguist than with actual differences in the sounds. Such suspected allophones/allographs are listed on a common row in the table below.

Some Khoisan languages are typologically unusual in allowing mixed voicing in non-click consonant clusters/contours, such as Template:IPA, so it is not surprising that they would allow mixed voicing in clicks as well. This may be an effect of epiglottalised voiced consonants, because voicing is incompatible with epiglottalisation.

Phonation

As do other consonants, clicks vary in phonation. Oral clicks are attested with four phonations: tenuis, aspirated, voiced and breathy voiced (murmured). Nasal clicks may also vary, with plain voiced, breathy voiced / murmured nasal, aspirated and unaspirated voiceless clicks attested (the last only in Taa). The aspirated nasal clicks are often said to have 'delayed aspiration'; there is nasal airflow throughout the click, which may become voiced between vowels, though the aspiration itself is voiceless. A few languages also have pre-glottalised nasal clicks, which have very brief prenasalisation but have not been phonetically analysed to the extent that other types of clicks have.

All languages have nasal clicks, and all but Dahalo and Damin also have oral clicks. All languages but Damin have at least one phonation contrast as well.

Complex clicks

Clicks may be pronounced with a third place of articulation, glottal. A glottal stop is made during the hold of the click; the (necessarily voiceless) click is released, and then the glottal hold is released into the vowel. Glottalised clicks are very common, and they are generally nasalised as well. The nasalisation cannot be heard during the click release, as there is no pulmonic airflow, and generally not at all when the click occurs at the beginning of an utterance, but it has the effect of nasalising preceding vowels, to the extent that the glottalised clicks of Sandawe and Hadza are often described as prenasalised when in medial position. Two languages, Gǀwi and Yeyi, contrast plain and nasal glottalised clicks, but in languages without such a contrast, the glottalised click is nasal. Miller (2011) analyses the glottalisation as phonation, and so considers these to be simple clicks.

Various languages also have prenasalised clicks, which may be analysed as consonant sequences. Sotho, for example, allows a syllabic nasal before its three clicks, as in nnqane 'the other side' (prenasalised nasal) and seqhenqha 'hunk'.

There is ongoing discussion as to how the distinction between what were historically described as 'velar' and 'uvular' clicks is best described. The 'uvular' clicks are only found in some languages, and have an extended pronunciation that suggests that they are more complex than the simple ('velar') clicks, which are found in all. Nakagawa (1996) describes the extended clicks in Gǀwi as consonant clusters, sequences equivalent to English st or pl, whereas Miller (2011) analyses similar sounds in several languages as click–non-click contours, where a click transitions into a pulmonic or ejective articulation within a single segment, analogous to how English ch and j transition from occlusive to fricative but still behave as unitary sounds. With ejective clicks, for example, Miller finds that although the ejective release follows the click release, it is the rear closure of the click that is ejective, not an independently articulated consonant. That is, in a simple click, the release of the rear articulation is not audible, whereas in a contour click, the rear (uvular) articulation is audibly released after the front (click) articulation, resulting in a double release.

These contour clicks may be linguo-pulmonic, that is, they may transition from a click (lingual) articulation to a normal pulmonic consonant like Template:IPAblink (e.g. Template:IPA); or linguo-glottalic and transition from lingual to an ejective consonant like Template:IPAblink (e.g. Template:IPA): that is, a sequence of ingressive (lingual) release + egressive (pulmonic or glottalic) release. In some cases there is a shift in place of articulation as well, and instead of a uvular release, the uvular click transitions to a velar or epiglottal release (depending on the description, Template:IPA or Template:IPA). Although homorganic Template:IPA does not contrast with heterorganic Template:IPA in any known language, they are phonetically quite distinct (Miller 2011).

Implosive clicks, i.e. velar Template:IPA, uvular Template:IPA, and de facto front-closed palatal Template:IPA are not only possible but easier to produce than modally voiced clicks. However, they are not attested in any language.<ref>Kenneth Pike, ed. Ruth Brend (1972) Selected Writings: To Commemorate the 60th Birthday of Kenneth Lee Pike. p. 226</ref>

Apart from Dahalo, Damin and many of the Bantu languages (Yeyi and Xhosa being exceptions), 'click' languages have glottalized nasal clicks. Contour clicks are restricted to southern Africa, but are very common there: they are found in all members of the Tuu, Kxʼa and Khoe families, as well as in the Bantu language Yeyi.

Variation among languages

In a comparative study of clicks across various languages, using her own field work as well as phonetic descriptions and data by other field researchers, Miller (2011) posits 21 types of clicks that contrast in manner or airstream.<ref group=note>Not counting the egressive "spurt" in Damin, and three additional voiced manners in Western ǃXoo, which pair up with voiceless manners.</ref> The homorganic and heterorganic affricated ejective clicks do not contrast in any known language, but are judged dissimilar enough to keep separate. Miller's conclusions differ from those of the primary researcher of a language; see the individual languages for details.

• Taa (ǃXóõ) and Nǁng (Nǀuu) are Tuu languages, from the two branches of that family.
• ǂʼAmkoe (ǂHoan) and Juǀʼhoan (ǃKung) are Kxʼa languages, from the two branches of that family.
• Korana and Gǀui (Gǁana) are Khoe languages, from the two branches of that family.

(all spoken primarily in South Africa, Namibia and Botswana; Khoekhoe is similar to Korana except it has lost ejective Template:IPA)

• Sandawe and Hadza are language isolates spoken in Tanzania
• Dahalo is a Cushitic language of Kenya
• Xhosa and Yeyi are Bantu languages, from the two geographic areas of that family that have acquired clicks.

(Zulu is similar to Xhosa apart from not having Template:IPA)

• Damin was an initiation jargon in northern Australia.

Each language below is illustrated with Ʞ as a placeholder for the different click types. Under each language are the orthography (in italics, with old forms in parentheses), the researchers' transcription (in Template:Angbr), or allophonic variation (in [brackets]). Some languages also have labialised or prenasalised clicks in addition to those listed below.

Language			Tuu		Kxʼa		Khoe		Sandawe	Hadza	Cushitic	Bantu		Australian
			Taa	Nǁng	ǂʼAmkoe	Juǀʼhoan<ref group=note>Ekoka ǃKung has an additional manner, Template:IPA. Grootfontein and Mangetti Dune ǃKung, on the other hand, have a substantially smaller inventory: Template:IPA.</ref>	Korana	Gǀui			Dahalo	Xhosa	Yeyi	Damin
Manner			Template:IPA			Template:IPA			Template:IPA		Template:IPA	Template:IPA	Template:IPA	Template:IPA
Simple oral click	Tenuis	Template:IPA	Template:Angbr*	Template:Angbr	Template:IPA	Ʞ (c, ç, q, x)	Ʞg	Template:Angbr	c, q, x	c, q, x (Ʞ)		c, q, x	Template:Angbr
	Voiced	Template:IPA	Template:Angbr*	Template:Angbr	Template:IPA	gꞰ (dq etc.)		Template:Angbr	gq etc. Template:IPA ~ Template:IPA				Template:Angbr
	Aspirated	Template:IPA	Template:Angbr*	Template:Angbr	Template:IPA	Ʞh (qh etc.)	Ʞkh	Template:Angbr	qh etc.	qh etc. (Ʞh)		qh etc.	Template:Angbr (= Ʞx ?)
	Breathy-voiced	Template:IPA	Template:Angbr*			gꞰh (dqh etc.) Template:IPA						gq etc.Template:Refn
Simple nasal click	Voiceless	Template:IPA	Template:Angbr* Template:IPA
	Voiced	Template:IPA	Template:Angbr* Template:IPA	Template:Angbr	Template:IPA	nꞰ (nq etc.)	Ʞn	Template:Angbr	nq etc.	nq etc. (nꞰ)	Template:IPA	nq etc.	Template:Angbr	Template:Angbr
	(Delayed) aspiration (prenasalised between vowels)	Template:IPA	Template:Angbr Template:IPA	Template:Angbr	Template:IPA	Ʞʼh (qʼh etc.)	Ʞh	Template:Angbr
	Breathy-voiced	Template:IPA	Template:Angbr			nꞰh (nqh etc.)						ngq etc.<ref group=note>Tone-depressor effect. Sometimes a prenasalized click with a short, voiced oral occlusion, but usually without.</ref>
Preglottalised nasal click		Template:IPA	Template:Angbr*		Template:IPA	(in Ekoka)
Glottalised click	Oral / velar ejective	Template:IPA	Template:Angbr*					Template:Angbr					Template:Angbr
	Creaky-voiced oral	Template:IPA	Template:Angbr*
	Nasal (silent initially, prenasalised after vowels)	Template:IPA	Template:Angbr	Template:Angbr	Template:IPA	Ʞʼ (qʼ etc.) (w/ nasal vowels)	Ʞ	Template:Angbr (Template:IPA)	qʼ etc. Template:IPA ~ Template:IPA	qq etc. (Ʞʼ ~ nꞰʼ)	Template:IPA	nkq etc. ?<ref>According to Nurse & Philippson (2003:616). This is typically transcribed as a prenasalized click, and is not included in Miller.</ref>	Template:Angbr
	Nasal (prenasalised initially)	Template:IPA	Template:Angbr
Pulmonic contour	Tenuis stop	Template:IPA	Template:Angbr	Template:Angbr	Template:IPA			Template:Angbr
	Voiced (and prenasalised)	Template:IPA	Template:Angbr Template:IPA	Template:IPA<ref group=note>not prenasalized</ref>	(Template:IPA)<ref group=note>perhaps borrowed from Gǀui</ref>			Template:Angbr Template:IPA
	Aspirated stop	Template:IPA	Template:Angbr	Template:Angbr	Template:IPA			Template:Angbr
	Breathy-voiced	Template:IPA	Template:Angbr
	Voiceless fricative	Template:IPA	Template:Angbr	Template:Angbr	Template:IPA	Ʞx (qg etc.)		Template:Angbr					Template:Angbr (?)
	Voiced fricative (prenasalised)	Template:IPA	Template:Angbr Template:IPA			gꞰx (dqg etc.)
Ejective contour	Ejective stop	Template:IPA	Template:Angbr	Template:IPA	Template:IPA			Template:Angbr
	Voiced ejective stop	Template:IPA	Template:Angbr
	Ejective fricative	Template:IPA		Template:Angbr	Template:IPA		Ʞkhʼ						Template:Angbr
	Heterorganic affricate / epiglottalised	Template:IPA	Template:Angbr			Ʞk (qgʼ etc.) Template:IPA		Template:Angbr
	Voiced heterorganic affricate / epiglottalised	Template:IPA	Template:Angbr			gꞰk (dqgʼ etc.) Template:IPA
Egressive<ref group=note>Not technically a click, but the only other attested sound with a lingual airstream mechanism.</ref>	(Voiceless "spurt"; labial only)	Template:IPA												Template:Angbr
		IPA	Taa	Nǁng	ǂʼAmkoe	Juǀʼhoan	Korana	Gǀui	Sandawe	Hadza	Dahalo	Xhosa	Yeyi	Damin

Yeyi also has prenasalised Template:IPA. The original researchers believe that Template:IPA and Template:IPA are allophones.

A DoBeS (2008) study of the Western ǃXoo dialect of Taa found several new manners: creaky voiced (the voiced equivalent of glottalised oral), breathy-voiced nasal, prenasalised glottalised (the voiced equivalent of glottalised) and a (pre)voiced ejective. These extra voiced clicks reflect Western ǃXoo morphology, where many nouns form their plural by voicing their initial consonant. DoBeS analyses most Taa clicks as clusters, leaving nine basic manners (marked with asterisks in the table). This comes close to Miller's distinction between simple and contour clicks, shaded light and medium grey in the table.

Phonotactics

Languages of the southern African Khoisan families only permit clicks at the beginning of a word root. However, they also restrict other classes of consonant, such as ejectives and affricates, to root-initial position. The Bantu languages, Hadza and Sandawe allow clicks within roots.

In some languages, all click consonants within known roots are the same phoneme, as in Hadza cikiringcingca Template:IPA 'pinkie finger', which has three tenuis dental clicks. Other languages are known to have the occasional root with different clicks, as in Xhosa ugqwanxa Template:IPA 'black ironwood', which has a slack-voiced alveolar click and a nasal lateral click.

No natural language allows clicks at the ends of syllables or words, but then no languages with clicks allows many consonants at all in those positions. Similarly, clicks are not found in underlying consonant clusters apart from /Cw/ (and, depending on the analysis, /Cχ/), as languages with clicks do not have other consonant clusters than that. Due to vowel elision, however, there are cases where clicks are pronounced in cross-linguistically common types of consonant clusters, such as Xhosa Template:IPA Snqobile, from Sinqobile (a name), and Template:IPA isXhosa, from isiXhosa (the Xhosa language).<ref>William Bennett (2020) Click Phonology, in Bonny Sands (ed.) Click Consonants, Brill, p. 115–116.</ref>

Like other articulatorily complex consonants, clicks tend to be found in lexical words rather than in grammatical words, but this is only a tendency. In Nǁng, for example, there are two sets of personal pronouns, a full one without clicks and a partial set with clicks (ńg 'I', á 'thou', í 'we all', ú 'you', vs. nǀǹg 'I', gǀà 'thou', gǀì 'we all', gǀù 'you'), as well as other grammatical words with clicks such as ǁu 'not' and nǀa 'with, and'.

The back-vowel constraint

File:Clicks and the BVC.svg

The shape of the tongue in Nama when articulating an alveolar click (blue) and a palatal click (red) [throat to the right]. The articulation of the vowel Template:IPA is slightly forward of the red line, with its peak coinciding with the dip of the blue line.

In several languages, including Nama and Juǀʼhoan, the alveolar click types Template:IPA and Template:IPA only occur, or preferentially occur, before back vowels, whereas the dental and palatal clicks occur before any vowel. The effect is most noticeable with the high front vowel Template:IPA. In Nama, for example, the diphthong Template:IPA is common but Template:IPA is rare after alveolar clicks, whereas the opposite is true after dental and palatal clicks. This is a common effect of uvular or uvularised consonants on vowels in both click and non-click languages. In Taa, for example, the back-vowel constraint is triggered by both alveolar clicks and uvular stops, but not by palatal clicks or velar stops: sequences such as Template:IPA and Template:IPA are rare to non-existent, whereas sequences such as Template:IPA and Template:IPA are common. The back-vowel constraint is also triggered by labial clicks, though not by labial stops. Clicks subject to this constraint involve a sharp retraction of the tongue during release.

	Abrupt release	Noisy release
ballistic tongue retraction & back-vowel constraint	Template:IPA	Template:IPA
no retraction, no constraint	Template:IPA	Template:IPA

Miller and colleagues (2003) used ultrasound imaging to show that the rear articulation of the alveolar clicks (Template:IPA) in Nama is substantially different from that of palatal and dental clicks. Specifically, the shape of the body of the tongue in palatal clicks is very similar to that of the vowel Template:IPA, and involves the same tongue muscles, so that sequences such as Template:IPA involved a simple and quick transition. The rear articulation of the alveolar clicks, however, is several centimetres further back, and involves a different set of muscles in the uvular region. The part of the tongue required to approach the palate for the vowel Template:IPA is deeply retracted in Template:IPA, as it lies at the bottom of the air pocket used to create the vacuum required for click airstream. This makes the transition required for Template:IPA much more complex and the timing more difficult than the shallower and more forward tongue position of the palatal clicks. Consequently, Template:IPA takes 50 ms longer to pronounce than Template:IPA, the same amount of time required to pronounce Template:IPA.

Languages do not all behave alike. In Nǀuu, the simple clicks Template:IPA trigger the Template:IPA and Template:IPA allophones of Template:IPA and Template:IPA, whereas Template:IPA do not. All of the affricated contour clicks, such as Template:IPA, do as well, as do the uvular stops Template:IPA. However, the occlusive contour clicks pattern like the simple clicks, and Template:IPA does not trigger the back-vowel constraint. This is because they involve tongue-root raising rather than tongue-root retraction in the uvular-pharyngeal region. However, in Gǀwi, which is otherwise largely similar, both Template:IPA and Template:IPA trigger the back-vowel constraint (Miller 2009).

Click genesis and click loss

One genetic study concluded that clicks, which occur in the languages of the genetically divergent populations Hadza and !Kung, may be an ancient element of human language.<ref>Template:Cite journal</ref> However, this conclusion relies on several dubious assumptions (see Hadza language), and most linguistsTemplate:Citation needed assume that clicks, being quite complex consonants, arose relatively late in human history. How they arose is not known, but it is generally assumed that they developed from sequences of non-click consonants, as they are found allophonically for doubly articulated consonants in West Africa,Template:Sfn for Template:IPA sequences that overlap at word boundaries in German,<ref name=germ /> and for the sequence Template:IPA in Ndau and Tonga.<ref group=note>Here the labial Template:IPA may have assimilated to the velar place of the Template:IPA, as Template:IPA, with the release of the labial before the velar later generating a click Template:IPA</ref> Such developments have also been posited in historical reconstruction. For example, the Sandawe word for 'horn', Template:IPA, with a lateral affricate, may be a cognate with the root Template:IPA found throughout the Khoe family, which has a lateral click. This and other words suggests that at least some Khoe clicks may have formed from consonant clusters when the first vowel of a word was lost; in this instance *Template:IPA > *Template:IPA > Template:IPA.

On the other side of the equation, several non-endangered languages in vigorous use demonstrate click loss. For example, the East Kalahari languages have lost clicks from a large percentage of their vocabulary, presumably due to Bantu influence. As a rule, a click is replaced by a consonant with close to the manner of articulation of the click and the place of articulation of the forward release: alveolar click releases (the Template:IPA family) tend to mutate into a velar stop or affricate, such as Template:IPA; palatal clicks (the Template:IPA family) tend to mutate into a palatal stop such as Template:IPA, or a post-alveolar affricate Template:IPA; and dental clicks (the Template:IPA family) tend to mutate into an alveolar affricate Template:IPA.Template:Citation needed

Difficulty

Clicks are often presented as difficult sounds to articulate within words. However, children acquire them readily; a two-year-old, for example, may be able to pronounce a word with a lateral click Template:IPA with no problem, but still be unable to pronounce Template:IPA.<ref>Kirk Miller, 'Highlights of Hadza fieldwork'. LSA, San Francisco, 2009.</ref> Lucy Lloyd reported that after long contact with the Khoi and San, it was difficult for her to refrain from using clicks when speaking English.<ref>Beach (1938), p 269.</ref>

See also

• Bilabial clicks
• Dental clicks
• Alveolar clicks
• Fricated alveolar clicks
• Lateral clicks
• Retroflex clicks
• Palatal clicks
• Back-released click
• Nasal clicks
• Glottalised clicks
• Pulmonic-contour clicks
• Ejective-contour clicks
• Click letters
• List of phonetics topics
• Sublaminal lower alveolar click
• Clicking noiseTemplate:Div col end

Bibliography

• Template:Cite book
• Template:SOWL
• Amanda Miller, Levi Namaseb, Khalil Iskarous. 2003. Tongue Body constriction differences in click types.
• Amanda Miller, 2011. "The Representation of Clicks". In Oostendorp et al. eds., The Blackwell Companion to Phonology.
• Traill, Anthony & Rainer Vossen. 1997. Sound change in the Khoisan languages: new data on click loss and click replacement. J African Languages and Linguistics 18:21–56.

External links

• Collection of click-language links and audio samples.
• Hartmut Traunmüller (2003) "Clicks and the idea of a human protolanguage", Phonum 9: 1 – 4 (Umeå University, Dept. of Philosophy and Linguistics) Template:Webarchive
• Classifying clicks