Dental clicks

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IPA – number 177
IPA – text ǀ
IPA – image {{{imagesize}}}
Entity ǀ
X-SAMPA |\
Kirshenbaum t!
Sound sample 

The dental clicks are a family of click consonants found, as constituents of words, only in Africa and in the Damin ritual jargon of Australia.

The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet ǀ, a vertical bar, represents either the forward articulation of these sounds or a tenuis dental click, depending on the school of phonetics. This is combined with a symbol for the rear articulation to represent other dental clicks. Attested dental clicks include:

The last is what is heard in the sound sample at right, as non-native speakers tend to glottalize clicks to avoid nasalizing them.

Prior to 1989, [ʇ] was the IPA representation of the voiceless velar dental click. It is still occasionally used where the symbol [ǀ] would be confounded with other symbols, such as prosody marks.

Contents

Features

Features of dental clicks:

The rear closure may be a voiced, nasal, ejective, or affricate, and have any of several phonations.

In English

English does not have the dental click (or any click consonant, for that matter) as a phoneme, but it does occur as an interjection, usually written tsk or tut (and often reduplicated tsk-tsk or tut-tut), used to express commiseration, disapproval, or irritation. Note, however, that while these words often represent a dental click and may be pronounced as such, they are also frequently pronounced as /tɪsk/ or /tʌt/, and in such cases are not dental clicks.

In other languages

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: [ŋ̊ǀ, ŋǀ, ŋ̊ǀʷ, ŋǀʷ].

Hungarian does not have any click consonant as a phoneme, but the dental click does occur as an interjection, usually written cöccögés, used to express commiseration, disapproval, or irritation. German uses the dental click in the exact same way as English, though it is usually rendered ts or tss in writing.

The dental click is used para-linguistically in several languages (mostly Middle-Eastern ones such as Arabic, Hebrew or Persian, including Dari and Tajiki, but also some languages spoken in regions closer to, or in, Europe, such as Turkish, Greek, Bulgarian or Romanian to denote a negative response to a "yes or no" question. The dental click is sometimes accompanied by an upward motion of the head.[1] [2]

References

  1. ^ Deliso, Christopher. "Saying Yes and No in the Balkans", Overseas Digest. Retrieved on 23 October 2008. 
  2. ^ WALS info on Para-linguistic usage of the dental click

See also