The lateral clicks are a family of click consonants found only in African languages. The clicking sound used by equestrians to urge on their horses is a lateral click, although it is not a speech sound in that context. Lateral clicks are found throughout southern Africa and in two languages in Tanzania. The place of articulation is not known to be contrastive in any language, and typically varies from alveolar to palatal. The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents a generic lateral click is, a double vertical bar. Prior to 1989, was the IPA letter for the lateral clicks, and this is still preferred by some phoneticians, as the vertical bar may be confounded with prosody marks and, in some fonts, with a double el. Either letter may be combined with a second letter to indicate the manner of articulation, though this is commonly omitted for tenuis clicks, and increasingly a diacritic is used instead. Common lateral clicks are: The last is what is heard in the sound sample above, as non-native speakers tend to glottalize clicks to avoid nasalizing them. In the orthographies of individual languages, the letters and digraphs for lateral clicks may be based on either the vertical bar symbol of the IPA,, or on the Latin of Bantu convention. Nama and most Saan languages use the former; Naro, Sandawe, and Zulu use the latter.
Features
The specific articulation of lateral clicks may vary from language to language, from dental to palatal, apical or laminal, though no contrast between such articulations has been confirmed apart from the retroflex clicks, which may have lateral release. Features of lateral clicks:
The release of the forward place of articulation is a noisy, affricate-like sound in southern Africa, but abrupt in Hadza and Sandawe in East Africa.
They are lateral consonants, which means they are produced by releasing the airstream at the side of the tongue, rather than in the middle. Some speakers pronounce them on one side of the mouth, some on both.
Regarding Khoekhoe, Tindall notes that European learners almost invariably pronounce these sounds as simple laterals, by placing the tongue against the side teeth, and that this articulation is "harsh and foreign to the native ear". The Namaqua instead cover the whole of the palate with the tongue, and produce the sound "as far back in the palate as possible".
Occurrence
does not have a lateral click as a phoneme, but a plain lateral click does occur as an interjection, usually written tchick! or tchek!, used to urge a horse to move.
