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.
Technically, 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.
Notation and sound description
Click consonants occur at six principal places of articulation. The International Phonetic Alphabet may represent a click by placing the assigned symbol for five of the places of articulation adjacent to a symbol for a non-click sound at the rear place of articulation, or the click symbol may be combined with diacritics for voicing, nasalization, etc. The IPA symbols are used in writing most Khoisan languages, but Bantu languages such as Zulu typically use Latin, and for dental, lateral and alveolar clicks respectively.- The easiest clicks for English speakers are the dental clicks written with a single pipe,. They are all 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, and sometimes to call an animal, and is written tut! in British English and tsk! in American English. In Italian this sound means "no" used as an answer to a direct question, while it is used to call cats when repeated several times.
- Next most familiar to English speakers are the lateral clicks written with a double pipe,. 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!
- Then there are the labial clicks, written with a bull's eye,. These are lip-smacking sounds, but without the pursing of the lips found in a kiss.
- With the alveolar clicks, written with an exclamation mark,, 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. These sounds can be quite loud.
- Finally, for most languages, the palatal clicks,, are made with a flat tongue, and are sharper popping sounds than the clicks, like sharply snapped fingers.
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, Swaziland, Lesotho, Zimbabwe and southern Mozambique, they were adopted from a Tuu language or languages 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. One of the clicks in Damin is actually an egressive click, using the tongue to compress the air in the mouth for an outward "spurt".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 c, though it begins with a t in all neighbouring languages.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 clicks in interjections, without the accompaniment of vowels, such as the dental "tsk-tsk" sound used to express disapproval, or the lateral tchick used with horses. In Armenian, Bulgarian, Greek, Levantine Arabic, Maltese, Persian, Romanian, Turkish, occasionally in French, as well as southern Italian languages such as Sicilian, in which a bare dental click accompanied by tipping the head upwards signifies "no". Libyan Arabic apparently has three such sounds.
Clicks occasionally turn up elsewhere, as in the special registers twins sometimes develop with each other. 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 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 in Gan and until recently began with in Mandarin as well. In Gan, the nursery rhyme is,
where the onsets are all pronounced.
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
For the most part, the Southern African Khoisan languages only use root-initial clicks. 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 then the languages that happen to have clicks have mostly CV syllables and allow at most only a limited set of consonants to close a syllable or end a word, most consonants share the distribution of clicks in these languages.Types of clicks used
The Khoesan families all have at least four click types, or variants thereof. A few have five, with bilabial or retroflex. Hadza and Sandawe have three,. Yeyi is the only Bantu language with four,, while Xhosa and Zulu have three,, and most Bantu languages with clicks have fewer than that.Types of clicks
Like other consonants, clicks can be described using four parameters: place of articulation, manner of articulation, phonation 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 described as oral or nasal, voiced or voiceless, etc. The literature also describes a contrast between velar and uvular rear articulations for some languages.However, recent work shows that in languages that make this distinction, all clicks have a uvular, or even pharyngeal, rear closure—and the clicks explicitly described as uvular are in fact clusters/contours of a click plus a pulmonic or ejective component, in which the cluster/contour has two release bursts, the forward and then the rearward component. "Velar" clicks in these languages have only a single release burst, that of the forward click release, and the release of the rear articulation isn't separately audible.
Nonetheless, in most of the literature the stated place of the click is the anterior articulation, whereas the manner is ascribed to the posterior articulation. The anterior articulation defines the click type and is written with the IPA letter for the click, whereas the traditional term 'accompaniment' conflates the categories of manner, phonation, as well as any change in the airstream with the release of the posterior articulation, all of which are transcribed with additional letters or diacritics, as in the nasal alveolar click, or or—to take an extreme example—the voiced ejective alveolar click,.
The size of click inventories ranges from as few as three or four, to dozens in the Kxʼa and Tuu languages. Taa, the last vibrant language in the latter family, has 45 to 115 click phonemes, depending on analysis, and over 70% of words in the dictionary of this language begin with a click.
Clicks appear more stop-like or affricate-like 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
The five click places of articulation with dedicated symbols in the International Phonetic Alphabet are labial, dental, palatal , alveolar and lateral. In most languages, the alveolar and palatal types are abrupt; that is, they are sharp popping sounds with little frication. 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. The apical places, and, are sometimes called "grave", because their pitch is dominated by low frequencies; whereas the laminal places, and, are sometimes called "acute", because they are dominated by high frequencies. Thus the alveolar click sounds something like a cork pulled from a bottle, at least in Xhosa; whereas the dental click 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 is different from what many people associate with a kiss: the lips are pressed more-or-less flat together, as they are for a or an, not rounded as they are for a.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, use a more iconic system based on the pipe. 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. In two orthographies of Juǀʼhoan, for example, voiced is written g! or dq, and !x or qg. In languages without, such as Zulu, may be written gq.
- was proposed by Clement Doke, and by Beach, but did not catch on. The former is not supported by Unicode, and the latter was proposed only in 2020. Three of these,, and, were adopted into the IPA, though eventually abandoned. Doke and Beach used additional or modified letters for voiced and nasal clicks, but they did not catch on.
- The labial and palatal clicks do not occur in written Bantu languages. However, the palatal clicks have been romanised in Naron, Juǀʼhõasi and !Xun, where they have been written, and, respectively. In the 19th century, they were sometimes written, which might be source of the Doke letter.
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 was analysed as a nasal velar rear articulation pronounced simultaneously with the forward ingressive release. The symbols may be written in either order, depending on the analysis: or. However, a tie bar was not often used in practice, and when the manner is tenuis, it was often omitted as well. That is, = = = =. Regardless, elements that do not overlap with the forward release are usually written according to their temporal order: Prenasalisation is always written first, and the non-lingual part of a contour is always written second.
However, it has become standard 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 for, 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: for.
| Tenuis | Aspirated | Voiced | Nasalised | "Uvular" | |
| Coarticulation analysis | k͡ǂ ~ ǂ͡k | k͡ǂʰ ~ ǂ͡kʰ | ɡ͡ǂ ~ ǂ͡ɡ | ŋ͡ǂ ~ ǂ͡ŋ | q͡ǂ ~ ǂ͡q |
| Unified, velar | ᵏǂ | ᵏǂʰ | ᶢǂ | ᵑǂ | qǂ |
| IPA diacritics | ǂ̥ | ǂʰ | ǂ̬ | ǂ̃ | ǂ͡q |
In practical orthography, the voicing or nasalisation is sometimes given the anterior place of articulation: dc for and mʘ for, for example.
In the literature on Damin, the clicks are transcribed as.
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 labial affricated, or "bilabial"; laminal denti-alveolar affricated, or "dental"; apical alveolar plosive, or "alveolar"; laminal palatal plosive, or "palatal"; laminal palatal affricated ; subapical postalveolar, or "retroflex" ; and apical alveolar lateral, or "lateral".| Labial | Dental | Alveolar | Retroflex | Domed | Palatal | Lateral | Velar |
| NA |
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 |
| dental only | Dahalo | Various nasal clicks only. |
| 1 release, variable | Sotho, Gciriku, Mbukushu | In Sotho the clicks tend to be alveolar, in Gciriku and Mbukushu dental. |
| 2 releases,, | Kwadi | not found with all manners |
| 2 releases,, | ǁXegwi | reacquired in loans |
| 3 releases,,, | Sandawe, Hadza, Xhosa, Zulu | In Hadza and Sandawe, is often "slapped". |
| 4 releases,,,, | Korana, Khoekhoe, Yeyi, Juǀʼhoan | |
| 4 releases,,,, | Ekoka !Kung | |
| 5 releases,,,,, | ǂHõã, Nǀu, ǀXam, Taa | |
| 5 releases,,,,, | Grootfontein !Kung | |
| 5 releases,,,,, | Damin | Aside from, all are nasal. |
Extra-linguistically, Coatlán Zapotec of Mexico uses a linguolabial click,, as mimesis for a pig drinking water, and several languages, such as Wolof, use a velar click, long judged to be physically impossible, for backchanneling and to express approval. A sublingual click 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.
Names found in the literature
The terms for the click types were originally developed by Bleek in 1862. Since then there has been some conflicting variation. However, apart from "cerebral", 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.| Click type | Bleek | Doke | IPA | Beach | IPA | IPA | Unicode | Miller et al. | Vosser | other |
| dental | dental | dental | dental affricative | dental | dental | dental | denti-pharyngeal | dental | alveolar affricated; denti-alveolar; apico-lamino-dental | |
| cerebral | palato-alveolar | cerebral | alveolar implosive | retroflex | alveolar | retroflex | central alveo-uvular | alveolar | palatal; palatal retroflex; apico-palatal | |
| lateral | lateral | alveolar lateral | lateral affricative | lateral | lateral | lateral | lateral alveo-uvular | lateral-alveolar | post-alveolar lateral; lateral apico-alveo-palatal | |
| palatal | alveolar | velar | denti-alveolar implosive | velar | palatoalveolar | alveolar | palato-pharyngeal | palatal | alveolar instantaneous; dental | |
| bilabial | bilabial | labio-uvular | bilabial | labial |
The dental, lateral and bilabial clicks are rarely confused. However, the palatal and alveolar clicks frequently had conflicting names in older literature, and still do in Unicode. However, since Ladefoged & Traill clarified the places of articulation, the terms listed under Vosser have become standard, apart from details such as whether and are alveolar and postalveolar, or is bilabial or labiodental, in a particular language, or whether the rear articulation is velar, uvular or pharyngeal, which again varies between languages.
The back-vowel constraint
In several languages, including Nama and Juǀʼhoan, the alveolar click types and 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. In Nama, for example, the diphthong is common but 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 and are rare to non-existent, whereas sequences such as and are common. It 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 | ǃ | ǁ, ʘ |
| no retraction, no constraint | ǂ | ǀ |
Miller and colleagues used ultrasound imaging to show that the rear articulation of the alveolar clicks 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, and involves the same tongue muscles, so that sequences such as 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 is deeply retracted in, 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 much more complex and the timing more difficult than the shallower and more forward tongue position of the palatal clicks. Consequently, takes 50 ms longer to pronounce than, the same amount of time required to pronounce.
Languages do not all behave alike. In Nǀuu, the simple clicks trigger the and allophones of and, whereas do not. All of the affricated contour clicks, such as, do as well, as do the uvular stops. However, the occlusive contour clicks pattern like the simple clicks, and 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 and trigger the back-vowel constraint.
Manners of articulation
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 of Khoekhoe, of Sandawe and 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, 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. Nasal clicks may also vary, with plain voiced, breathy voiced / murmured nasal, aspirated and unaspirated voiceless clicks attested. 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 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 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' 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 clicks, which are found in all. Nakagawa describes the extended clicks in Gǀwi as consonant clusters, sequences equivalent to English st or pl, whereas Miller 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 articulation is audibly released after the front articulation, resulting in a double release.
These contour clicks may be linguo-pulmonic, that is, they may transition from a click articulation to a normal pulmonic consonant like ; or linguo-glottalic and transition from lingual to an ejective consonant like : that is, a sequence of ingressive release + egressive 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 epigottal release. Although homorganic does not contrast with heterorganic in any known language, they are phonetically quite distinct.
Apart from Dahalo, Damin and many of the Bantu languages, 'click' languages have glottalised 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 posits 21 types of clicks that contrast in manner or airstream. 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 and Nǁng are Tuu languages, from the two branches of that family.
- ǂʼAmkoe and Juǀʼhoan are Kxʼa languages, from the two branches of that family.
- Korana and Gǀui are Khoe languages, from the two branches of that family.
- 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.
- Damin was an initiation jargon in northern Australia.
Yeyi also has prenasalised. The original researchers believe that and are allophones.
A DoBeS study of the Western ǃXoo dialect of Taa found several new manners: creaky voiced, breathy-voiced nasal, prenasalised glottalised and a 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. 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 'pinkie finger', which has three tenuis dental clicks. Other languages are known to have the occasional root with different clicks, as in Xhosa ugqwanxa 'black ironwood', which has a slack-voiced alveolar click and a nasal lateral click.
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, as well as other grammatical words with clicks such as ǁu 'not' and nǀa 'with, and'.
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. However, this conclusion relies on several dubious assumptions, and most linguists 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, where sequences overlap at word boundaries in German, and for the sequence in Ndau and Tonga. Such developments have also been posited in historical reconstruction. For example, the Sandawe word for 'horn',, with a lateral affricate, may be a cognate with the root 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 * > * >.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 tend to mutate into a velar stop or affricate, such as ; palatal clicks tend to mutate into a palatal stop such as, or a post-alveolar affricate ; and dental clicks tend to mutate into an alveolar affricate.