Dental clicks

Dental clicks are a family of click consonants found, as constituents of words, only in Africa and in the Damin ritual jargon of Australia. The tut-tut! (British spelling) or tsk! tsk! (American spelling) sound used to express disapproval or pity is a dental click, although it isn't a speech sound in that context.

The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents the place of articulation of these sounds is ⟨ǀ⟩, a pipe. Prior to 1989, ⟨ʇ⟩ was the IPA representation of the tenuis dental click. It is still occasionally used where the symbol ⟨ǀ⟩ would be confounded with other symbols, such as prosody marks, or simply because in many fonts the pipe is indistinguishable from an el or capital i.^[1] 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 dental clicks are:

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

Features

Features of dental clicks:

• The basic articulation may be voiced, nasal, aspirated, glottalized, etc.
• The forward place of articulation is dental or alveolar and laminal, which means it is articulated with the tip of the tongue against the alveolar ridge or the upper teeth. (See denti-alveolar.) The release is a noisy, affricate-like sound.
• 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 central consonants, which means they are produced by releasing the airstream at the center of the tongue, rather than at the sides.
• 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

Dental clicks are common in Khoisan languages and the neighboring Nguni languages, such as Zulu and Xhosa. In the Nguni languages, the tenuis click is denoted by the letter c, the murmured click by gc, the aspirated click by ch, and the nasal click by nc. The prenasalized clicks are written ngc and nkc.

The Cushitic language Dahalo has four clicks, all of them nasalized: [ᵑ̊ʇ, ᵑʇ, ᵑ̊ʇʷ, ᵑʇʷ].

Dental clicks may also be used used para-linguistically. For example, English speakers use a plain dental click, usually written tsk or tut (and often reduplicated tsk-tsk or tut-tut; these spellings often lead to spelling pronunciations /tɪsk/ or /tʌt/), as an interjection to express commiseration, disapproval, irritation, or to call a small animal. German (ts or tss), Hungarian (cöccögés), Portuguese (tsc) and French (tut-tut) speakers use the dental click in exactly the same way as English.

The dental click is also used para-linguistically Middle-Eastern languages such as Arabic, Hebrew, Turkish, Pashto, and Persian where it is transcribed as 'نچ'/'noch' (including Dari and Tajiki). It is also used some languages spoken in regions closer to, or in, Europe, such as Greek, Bulgarian, Italian, Portuguese, Romanian or Serbian to denote a negative response to a "yes or no" question. The dental click is sometimes accompanied by an upward motion of the head.^[2][3]

See also

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

References

Bibliography

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

Notes

External links

• The Meaning of Tsk Tsk Tsk (YouTube). 16 July 2010. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-imfjwhDM0A.