The alveolar or postalveolar clicks are a family of click consonants found only in

Africa Africa is the world's second-largest and second-most populous continent, after Asia in both cases. At about 30.3 million km2 (11.7 million square miles) including adjacent islands, it covers 6% of Earth's total surface area ...

and in the

Damin Damin ( in the practical orthography of Lardil) was a ceremonial language register used by the advanced initiated men of the aboriginal Lardil ( in the practical orthography) and Yangkaal peoples of northern Australia. Both inhabit island ...

ritual jargon of Australia. The tongue is more or less concave (depending on the language), and is pulled down rather than back as in the

palatal click The palatal or palato-alveolar clicks are a family of click consonants found, as components of words, only in southern Africa. The tongue is nearly flat, and is pulled back rather than down as in the postalveolar clicks, making a sharper sound ...

s, making a hollower sound than those consonants. The symbol in the

International Phonetic Alphabet The International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) is an alphabetic system of phonetic notation based primarily on the Latin script. It was devised by the International Phonetic Association in the late 19th century as a standardized representation ...

that represents the

place of articulation In articulatory phonetics, the place of articulation (also point of articulation) of a consonant is a location along the vocal tract where its production occurs. It is a point where a constriction is made between an active and a passive articula ...

of these sounds is . The symbol is not an

exclamation mark The exclamation mark, , or exclamation point (American English), is a punctuation mark usually used after an interjection or exclamation to indicate strong feelings or to show emphasis. The exclamation mark often marks the end of a sentence, f ...

in origin, but rather a vertical bar with a subscript dot, the dot being the old diacritic for retroflex consonants. Prior to 1989, (stretched c) was the IPA letter for the alveolar clicks, and this is still preferred by some phoneticians. The tail of may be the tail of retroflex consonants in the IPA, and thus analogous to the underdot of . Either letter may be combined with a second letter to indicate the manner of articulation, though this is commonly omitted for tenuis clicks. In official IPA transcription, the click letter is combined with a via a tie bar, though is frequently omitted. Many authors instead use a superscript without the tie bar, again often neglecting the . Either letter, whether baseline or superscript, is usually placed before the click letter, but may come after when the release of the velar or uvular occlusion is audible. A third convention is the click letter with diacritics for voicelessness, voicing and nasalization; it does not distinguish velar from uvular alveolar clicks. Common alveolar clicks are: The last can be heard in the sound sample at right; non-native speakers tend to ''glottalize'' clicks to avoid nasalizing them. The nasal click may also be heard at the right. In the orthographies of individual languages, the letters and digraphs for alveolar clicks may be based on either the vertical bar symbol of the IPA, , or on the Latin of Bantu convention.

Khoekhoe Khoekhoen (singular Khoekhoe) (or Khoikhoi in the former orthography; formerly also '' Hottentots''"Hottentot, n. and adj." ''OED Online'', Oxford University Press, March 2018, www.oed.com/view/Entry/88829. Accessed 13 May 2018. Citing G. S. ...

and most Bushman languages use the former;

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, Sandawe, and Zulu use the latter.

Features

Features of postalveolar clicks: *The forward

is alveolar or postalveolar, depending on the language, and

apical Apical means "pertaining to an apex". It may refer to: *Apical ancestor, refers to the last common ancestor of an entire group, such as a species (biology) or a clan (anthropology) *Apical (anatomy), an anatomical term of location for features loc ...

, which means it is articulated with the tip of the tongue against the

alveolar ridge The alveolar process () or alveolar bone is the thickened ridge of bone that contains the tooth sockets on the jaw bones (in humans, the maxilla and the mandible). The structures are covered by gums as part of the oral cavity. The synonymous t ...

or the roof of the mouth behind the alveolar ridge. (Damin contrasted these two articulations as separate

phoneme In phonology and linguistics, a phoneme () is a unit of sound that can distinguish one word from another in a particular language. For example, in most dialects of English, with the notable exception of the West Midlands and the north-wes ...

s.) The release is a sharp, plosive sound in southern Africa, but in Sandawe it may be percussive, with the underside of the tip of the tongue striking the floor of the mouth after the release of the click (see below), and in Hadza the release is often quite weak.

Occurrence

English English usually refers to: * English language * English people English may also refer to: Peoples, culture, and language * ''English'', an adjective for something of, from, or related to England ** English national ide ...

does not have an alveolar click (or any other click consonant) as a phoneme, but a plain alveolar click does occur in mimesis, as a sound children use to imitate a horse trotting.

Percussive release

In Sandawe, alveolar clicks commonly have a ballistic release, with the underside of the tip of the tongue subsequently striking the floor of the mouth. This allophone has been called "flapped" and "slapped". Sometimes the percussive slap is louder than the release, resulting in a sound that has been characterized as a "cluck". The symbol for the sublingual percussive component is in the

extensions to the IPA The Extensions to the International Phonetic Alphabet for Disordered Speech, commonly abbreviated extIPA , are a set of letters and diacritics devised by the International Clinical Phonetics and Linguistics Association to augment the Internati ...

; a slapped click is therefore transcribed or (or ). The percussive allophones of the five Sandawe alveolar clicks are (or ). Nasal clicks that fit this description are used by speakers of Gan Chinese (from

Ningdu Ningdu County () is a county in the southeast of Jiangxi province, People's Republic of China. It is the northernmost county-level division under the administration of the prefecture-level city of Ganzhou. The village of Xiaoyuan in Ningdu County ...

county) and of Mandarin (from Beijing and

Jilin Jilin (; alternately romanized as Kirin or Chilin) is one of the three provinces of Northeast China. Its capital and largest city is Changchun. Jilin borders North Korea ( Rasŏn, North Hamgyong, Ryanggang and Chagang) and Russia (Prim ...

), and presumably people from other parts of the country, with varying degrees of competence in nursery rhymes for 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 (disregarding tone), :' 'a goose in the sky' :' 'a duck on the ground' :' 'a goose lays a goose egg, a goose hatches a goose' :' 'a duck lays a duck egg, a duck hatches a duck' where the onsets are all pronounced .Geoffrey Nathan, 'Clicks in a Chinese Nursery Rhyme', JIPA (2001) 31/2.

"Fricated" alveolar clicks

A series of clicks in Ekoka !Kung have been variously described as retroflex or fricated palatal clicks.

References

External links