The bilabial clicks are a family of
click consonant
Click consonants, or clicks, are speech sounds that occur as consonants in many languages of Southern Africa and in three languages of East Africa. Examples familiar to English-speakers are the '' tut-tut'' (British spelling) or '' tsk! tsk!'' ...
s that sound like a smack of the lips. They are found as
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-west o ...
s only in the small
Tuu language family (currently two languages, one moribund), in the
ǂ’Amkoe language of
Botswana
Botswana (, ), officially the Republic of Botswana ( tn, Lefatshe la Botswana, label=Setswana, ), is a landlocked country in Southern Africa. Botswana is topographically flat, with approximately 70 percent of its territory being the Kalahar ...
(also moribund), and in the extinct
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
Australia, officially the Commonwealth of Australia, is a Sovereign state, sovereign country comprising the mainland of the Australia (continent), Australian continent, the island of Tasmania, and numerous List of islands of Australia, sma ...
. However, bilabial clicks are found paralinguistically for a kiss in various languages, including integrated into a greeting in the
Hadza language
Hadza is a language isolate spoken along the shores of Lake Eyasi in Tanzania by around 1,000 Hadza people, who include in their number the last full-time hunter-gatherers in Africa. It is one of only three languages in East Africa with click con ...
of
Tanzania
Tanzania (; ), officially the United Republic of Tanzania ( sw, Jamhuri ya Muungano wa Tanzania), is a country in East Africa within the African Great Lakes region. It borders Uganda to the north; Kenya to the northeast; Comoro Islands and ...
, and as allophones of
labial–velar stops in some West African languages (Ladefoged 1968), as of /mw/ in some of the languages neighboring Shona, such as
Ndau and
Tonga
Tonga (, ; ), officially the Kingdom of Tonga ( to, Puleʻanga Fakatuʻi ʻo Tonga), is a Polynesian country and archipelago. The country has 171 islands – of which 45 are inhabited. Its total surface area is about , scattered over in ...
.
The symbol in the
International Phonetic Alphabet
The International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) is an alphabetic system of phonetic transcription, phonetic notation based primarily on the Latin script. It was devised by the International Phonetic Association in the late 19th century as a standa ...
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 . This may be combined with a second letter to indicate the
manner of articulation
In articulatory phonetics, the manner of articulation is the configuration and interaction of the articulators (speech organs such as the tongue, lips, and palate) when making a speech sound. One parameter of manner is ''stricture,'' that is, h ...
, 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 labial clicks. Common labial 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.
Damin also had an egressive bilabial , which may be an egressive click (if it is not
buccal) and which is always followed by another consonant (, or ).
Features
Features of ingressive labial clicks:
*The forward
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 ...
is
labial
The term ''labial'' originates from '' Labium'' (Latin for "lip"), and is the adjective that describes anything of or related to lips, such as lip-like structures. Thus, it may refer to:
* the lips
** In linguistics, a labial consonant
** In zoolog ...
, which means it is articulated with the lips. The release is a noisy,
affricate
An affricate is a consonant that begins as a stop and releases as a fricative, generally with the same place of articulation (most often coronal). It is often difficult to decide if a stop and fricative form a single phoneme or a consonant pair. ...
-like sound. Bilabial articulation, using both lips, is typical. Sometimes this may pass through a
labio-dental
In phonetics, labiodentals are consonants articulated with the lower lip and the upper teeth.
Labiodental consonants in the IPA
The labiodental consonants identified by the International Phonetic Alphabet are:
The IPA chart shades out ''labio ...
stage as the click is released, making it noisier. In other cases, the lower lip may start out in contact with both the upper teeth and the upper lip.
(One of the two labial clicks in Damin is lingual ''egressive,'' which means that the trapped air pocket is compressed by the tongue until it is allowed to spurt out through the lips.)
The labial clicks are sometimes erroneously described as sounding like a kiss. However, they do not have the pursed lips of a kiss. Instead, the lips are
compressed, more like a than a , and they sound more like a noisy smack of the lips than a kiss.
Symbol
The bullseye or bull's eye () symbol used in
phonetic transcription
Phonetic transcription (also known as phonetic script or phonetic notation) is the visual representation of speech sounds (or ''phones'') by means of symbols. The most common type of phonetic transcription uses a phonetic alphabet, such as the ...
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
Unicode, formally The Unicode Standard,The formal version reference is is an information technology Technical standard, standard for the consistent character encoding, encoding, representation, and handling of Character (computing), text expre ...
as .
The
superscript IPA version is .
Similar graphemes consisting of a circled dot encoded by Unicode are:
*Gothic ðˆ,
hwair
Hwair (also , , ) is the name of , the Gothic letter expressing the or sound (reflected in English by the inverted '' wh''-spelling for ). Hwair is also the name of the Latin ligature (capital ) used to transcribe Gothic.
Name
The name of the ...
*
astronomical symbol
Astronomical symbols are abstract pictorial symbols used to represent astronomical objects, theoretical constructs and observational events in European astronomy. The earliest forms of these symbols appear in Greek papyrus texts of late antiq ...
☉ "Sun"
*
mathematical operators
Mathematical Operators is a Unicode block containing characters for mathematical, logical, and set notation.
Notably absent are the plus sign (+), greater than sign (>) and less than sign (<), due to them already appearing in the Basic ...
and
*geometrical symbol
*Cyrillic Ꙩ, ꙩ (
monocular O
Monocular O ( majuscule: , minuscule: ) is one of the rare glyph variants of Cyrillic letter . This glyph variant was used in certain manuscripts in the root word ( eye), and also in some other functions, for example, in the word- and syllable- ...
)
It was never widely used and was eventually dropped for . Still the deprecated IPA character is encoded at . Earlier it is
privately encoded by
SIL International
SIL International (formerly known as the Summer Institute of Linguistics) is an evangelical Christian non-profit organization whose main purpose is to study, develop and document languages, especially those that are lesser-known, in order to ex ...
at and is available in SIL supporting fonts.
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 a labial click (or any click consonant, for that matter) as a phoneme, but a plain bilabial click does occur in
mimesis
Mimesis (; grc, μίμησις, ''mīmēsis'') is a term used in literary criticism and philosophy that carries a wide range of meanings, including ''imitatio'', imitation, nonsensuous similarity, receptivity, representation, mimicry, the act ...
, 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
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 ...
.
Origins
Labial clicks may have arisen historically from
labialization
Labialization is a secondary articulatory feature of sounds in some languages. Labialized sounds involve the lips while the remainder of the oral cavity produces another sound. The term is normally restricted to consonants. When vowels involve ...
of other places of articulation. Starostin (2003) notes that the ǂ’Amkoe words for 'one' and 'two', and , have labial clicks whereas no other Khoisan language has a labial consonant of any kind in its words for these numerals, and Starostin (2007) and Sands reconstruct a series of labialized clicks in
Proto-Kxʼa, which became labial clicks in ǂ’Amkoe. In Hadza, the word for 'kiss', , becomes a mimetic or in greetings.
[Anywire, Bala, Miller & Sands (2013) ''A Hadza Lexicon'', ms.]
See also
*
Alveolar click
The alveolar or postalveolar clicks are a family of click consonants found only in Africa and in the Damin ritual jargon of Australia. The tongue is more or less concave (depending on the language), and is pulled down rather than back as in t ...
*
Dental click
Dental (or more precisely denti-alveolar) clicks are a family of click consonants found, as constituents of words, only in Africa and in the Damin ritual jargon of Australia.
In English, the ''tut-tut!'' (British spelling, "tutting") or ''ts ...
*
Lateral click
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 t ...
*
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 ...
*
Retroflex click
The retroflex clicks are a family of click consonants known only from the Central !Kung dialects of Namibia. They are sub-apical retroflex and should not be confused with the more widespread postalveolar clicks, which are sometimes mistakenly ...
*
List of phonetics topics
A
* Acoustic phonetics
* Active articulator
* Affricate
* Airstream mechanism
* Alexander John Ellis
* Alexander Melville Bell
* Alfred C. Gimson
* Allophone
* Alveolar approximant ()
* Alveolar click ()
* Alveolar consonant
* Alveolar ejective ...
Notes
References
*
*
External links
*
{{DEFAULTSORT:Biabial Clicks
Bilabial consonants
Phonetic transcription symbols
Click consonants