Bilabial clicks
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The bilabial clicks are a family of click consonants found as phonemes only in the Tuu family, in the ǂHõã language of Botswana, in a single word in Hadza, and in the Damin ritual jargon of Australia.
The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents the forward articulation of these sounds is ʘ. This must be combined with a symbol for the rear articulation to represent an actual speech sound. Attested bilabial clicks include but are not limited to:
- [k͡ʘ] or [ʘ͡k] voiceless velar bilabial click (may also be aspirated, ejective, affricated, etc.)
- [ɡ͡ʘ] or [ʘ͡ɡ] voiced velar bilabial click (may also be breathy voiced, affricated, etc.)
- [ŋ͡ʘ] or [ʘ͡ŋ] nasal velar bilabial click (may also be voiceless, aspirated, etc.)
- [q͡ʘ] or [ʘ͡q] voiceless uvular bilabial click
- [ɢ͡ʘ] or [ʘ͡ɢ] voiced uvular bilabial click (commonly prenasalized)
- [ɴ͡ʘ] or [ʘ͡ɴ] nasal uvular bilabial click
- [ʘ͡ʔ] glottalized bilabial click
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 [k͡ʘ↑], the world's only attested egressive click.
Features
Features of ingressive bilabial clicks:
- The rear closure may be voiced, nasal, ejective, or affricate, and have any of several phonations.
- The forward place of articulation is bilabial, which means it is articulated with both lips.[1].
- The rear place of articulation may be either velar or uvular.
- Bilabial clicks may be either oral or nasal, which means air is allowed to escape either through the mouth or the nose.
- They are central consonants, which means they are produced by allowing the airstream to flow over the middle of the tongue, rather than the sides.
- The airstream mechanism is lingual ingressive (velaric ingressive), which means the pocket of air trapped between the two closures is rarefied by a "sucking" action of the tongue, rather than by the glottis or the lungs. The release of the forward closure produces the 'click' sound. (One of the two labial clicks in Damin is velaric/lingual egressive, which means the air spurts out into the mouth between the lips under the pressure of the tongue.)
The bilabial clicks are sometimes erroneously described as sounding like a kiss. However, they do not have the pursed lips of a kiss (that is, they're not rounded). Instead, they have an articulation more like like that of a [p], and sound more like a smack of the lips.
The egressive click differs from the above in that the trapped air pocket is compressed by the tongue until it is allowed to escape through the forward articulation.
Symbol
The bullseye or bull's eye (ʘ) symbol used in phonetic transcription 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 as U+0298 LATIN LETTER BILABIAL CLICK.
Similar graphemes consisting of a circled dot encoded by Unicode are:
- Gothic 𐍈 ƕair
- astronomical symbol ☉ "Sun"
- mathematical operators ⊙ "circled dot operator" and ⨀ and "n-ary circled dot operator"
- geometrical symbol ◉ "fisheye"
A symbol created for the IPA, (a turned b with a tail) was never widely used and was eventually dropped for ʘ.
Notes
- ^ Sometimes this may pass through a labiodental stage as the click is released, making it noisier (Ladefoged & Maddieson 1996:251).
References
- Pullum, Geoffrey K.; Ladusaw, William A. (1996). Phonetic Symbol Guide. University of Chicago Press, 132–133.
- Ladefoged, Peter; Maddieson, Ian (1996). The Sounds of the World's Languages. Blackwell Publishers, 246-280.
See also
