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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!
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 the palatal clicks, making a hollower sound than those consonants.
In speech recording, click noises (not to be confused with click consonants) result from tongue movements, swallowing, mouth and saliva noises. [8] While in voice-over recordings, click noises are undesirable, they can be used as a sound effect of close-miking in ASMR and pop music, e.g. in Bad Guy (2019) by Billie Eilish. [9]
The bilabial clicks are a family of click consonants that sound like a smack of the lips. They are found as phonemes only in the small Tuu language family (currently two languages, one down to its last speaker), in the ǂ’Amkoe language of Botswana (also moribund), and in the extinct Damin ritual jargon of Australia.
The voiced-click letters are more individuated, a couple were simply inverted versions of the tenuis-click letters. The tenuis–voiced pairs were dental ʇ ɣ (the letter ɣ had not yet been added to the IPA for the voiced velar fricative ), alveolar ʗ 𝒬 , retroflex ψ ⫛ , [ 26 ] palatal ↆ ꙟ (or 🡣 🡡 ) and lateral ʖ ➿︎ .
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 throughout southern Africa, for example in Zulu , and in some languages in Tanzania and Namibia.
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 than those consonants.
Nasal clicks are click consonants pronounced with nasal airflow.All click types (alveolar ǃ, dental ǀ, lateral ǁ, palatal ǂ, retroflex ‼, and labial ʘ) have nasal variants, and these are attested in four or five phonations: voiced, voiceless, aspirated, murmured (breathy voiced), and—in the analysis of Miller (2011)—glottalized.