Bilabial clicks

Bilabial click
(plain)
ʘ
IPA number 176
Encoding
Entity (decimal) ʘ
Unicode (hex) U+0298
X-SAMPA O\
Kirshenbaum p!
Sound

 
Voiced bilabial click
ʘ̬
ᶢʘ
Encoding
Kirshenbaum b!
Bilabial nasal click
ʘ̃
ᵑʘ ᵐʘ
Encoding
Kirshenbaum m!

The bilabial clicks are a family of click consonants that sound something like a smack of the lips. They are found as phonemes only in the small Tuu language family, in the ǂHõã language of Botswana (though reconstructed for the Kx'a family), and in the extinct Damin ritual jargon of Australia.

The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents the place of articulation of these sounds is ⟨ʘ⟩. 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 bilabial clicks are:

IPA I IPA II Description
[ʘ] tenuis bilabial click
[ʘʰ] aspirated bilabial click
[ʘ̬] [ᶢʘ] voiced bilabial click
[ʘ̃] [ᵑʘ] nasal bilabial click
[ʘ̥̃ʰ] [ᵑ̊ʘʰ] aspirated nasal bilabial click
[ʘˀ] or [ʘ̥̃ˀ] [ʘˀ] or [ᵑ̊ʘˀ]) glottalized nasal bilabial click

The last is what is heard in the sound sample at right, as non-native speakers tend to glottalize clicks to avoid nasalizing them.

Damin also had an egressive bilabial [ʘ↑], the world's only attested egressive click.

Contents

Features

Features of ingressive bilabial clicks:

The bilabial clicks are sometimes erroneously described as sounding like a kiss. However, they do not have the pursed lips of a kiss (that is, they're not rounded). Instead, they have an articulation more like that of a [p], and sound more like a smack of the lips.

Symbol

The bullseye or bull's eye (ʘ) symbol used in phonetic transcription of the phoneme was made an official part of the International Phonetic Alphabet in 1979, but had existed for at least 50 years earlier. It is encoded in Unicode as U+0298 LATIN LETTER BILABIAL CLICK.

Similar graphemes consisting of a circled dot encoded by Unicode are:

A symbol created for the IPA, (a turned b with a tail) was never widely used and was eventually dropped for ʘ.

Occurrence

English does not have a bilabial click (or any click consonant, for that matter) as a phoneme, but a plain bilabial click does occur in mimesis, as a lip-smacking sound children use to imitate a fish.

Labial clicks only occur in the Tuu and Kx'a families of southern Africa, and in the Australian ritual language Damin.

Language Word IPA Meaning
ǂHoan ʘoa two
Taa ʘàa child
Damin m!i ʘ̃i vegetable

Notes

  1. ^ Sometimes this may pass through a labiodental stage as the click is released, making it noisier (Ladefoged & Maddieson 1996:251)

References

See also