Dental click

Dental click consonants and their transcription

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; this does not distinguish velar from uvular dental clicks. Common dental clicks in these three transcriptions 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.

In the orthographies of individual languages, the letters and digraphs for dental clicks may be based on either the vertical bar symbol of the IPA, , or on the Latin of Bantu convention. Nama and most Bushman languages use the former; Naro, Sandawe, and Zulu use the latter.

Features

Features of dental clicks:

• The forward place of articulation is typically dental (or denti-alveolar) and laminal, which means it is articulated with the tip of the tongue against the alveolar ridge or the upper teeth, but depending on the language may be interdental or even apical. The release is a noisy, affricate-like sound.

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: .

Dental clicks may also be 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 or ), as an interjection to express commiseration, disapproval, irritation, or to call a small animal. German (ts or tss), Hungarian (cöccögés), Persian (noch), Portuguese (tsc), Russian (ts-ts-ts; sound file) Spanish (ts) and French (t-t-t-t) speakers use the dental click in a similar way as English.

The dental click is also used para-linguistically in Semitic languages such as Arabic, Hebrew and Indo-European Pashto, and Persian where it is transcribed as نچ/noch and is also used as a negative response to a "yes or no" question (including Dari and Tajiki). It is also used in some languages spoken in regions closer to, or in, Europe, such as Turkish, Albanian, Greek, Bulgarian, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish, Romanian or Serbo-Croatian to denote a negative response to a "yes or no" question. The dental click is sometimes accompanied by an upward motion of the head.

Notes

References

References

1. Ladefoged & Traill, 1984:18
2. In the English sound, the velar closure is not released, unlike the released sound found in languages that combine clicks with vowels.
3. John Wells, 2011. [https://phonetic-blog.blogspot.com/2011/04/vertical-lines.html Vertical lines]. Compare the vertical bar, {{angbr IPA. ǀ, with {{angbr IPA. . , {{angbr IPA. l, and {{angbr IPA. I (unformatted {{angbr. ǀ, {{angbr. . , {{angbr. l, {{angbr. I).
4. Deliso, Christopher. "Saying Yes and No in the Balkans". Overseas Digest.
5. [http://wals.info/feature/description/142 WALS info on Para-linguistic usage of the dental click]