Lateral clicks

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. Alveolar lateral clicks are found throughout southern Africa and in two languages in Tanzania.

Alveolar lateral clicks

Most lateral clicks are alveolar. These are found in all Khoisan languages as well as in several Bantu languages. The only languages with non-alveolar lateral clicks are in the Juu family (see below).

The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents the place of articulation of these sounds is ⟨ǁ⟩, a double pipe. Prior to 1989, ⟨ʖ⟩ was the IPA representation of the tenuis alveolar lateral click, and this is still preferred by some phoneticians, as the pipe 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 alveolar 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.

Features

Features of alveolar lateral clicks:

• The basic articulation may be voiced, nasal, aspirated, glottalized, etc.
• The forward place of articulation is apical alveolar, which means it is articulated with the tip of the tongue against the alveolar ridge. The release is a noisy, affricate-like sound in southern Africa, but abrupt in Hadza and Sandawe in East Africa.
• Clicks may be oral or nasal, which means that the airflow is either restricted to the mouth, or passes through the nose as well.
• 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.
• The airstream mechanism is lingual ingressive (aka velaric ingressive), which means a pocket of air trapped between two closures is rarefied by a "sucking" action of the tongue, rather than being moved by the glottis or the lungs/diaphragm. The release of the forward closure produces the 'click' sound. Voiced and nasal clicks have a simultaneous pulmonic egressive airstream.

Occurrence

English does not have a lateral click (or any click consonant, for that matter) as a phoneme, but a plain alveolar lateral click does occur as an interjection, usually written tchick! or tchek! (and often reduplicated tchick-tchick!), used to urge a horse to move.

Dental lateral clicks

In addition to alveolar articulations, dental lateral clicks are reported from speakers of an Angolan ǃXũũ dialect now residing in Mangetti Dune, Namibia. These include at least voiceless, voiced, and nasal phonations, and are reflexes of the retroflex clicks of Proto-Juu. They are provisionally written with three pipes, ⟨ǀǀǀ⟩, rather than the two of the alveolar lateral ⟨ǁ⟩. They are laminal alveolar or denti-alveolar, [ǁ̻], while the clicks transcribed as ⟨ǁ⟩ are apical postalveolar, [ǁ̺].

Contrasting lateral clicks in Mangetti Dune ǃXũũ:

References

• Pullum, Geoffrey K.; Ladusaw, William A. (1996). Phonetic Symbol Guide. University of Chicago Press. pp. 178. 

See also

• Alveolar clicks
• Bilabial clicks
• Dental clicks
• Palatal clicks
• Retroflex clicks
• List of phonetics topics