The alveolar or postalveolar clicks are a family of 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 , making a hollower sound than those consonants.
The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents the place of articulation of these sounds is . The symbol is not an exclamation mark in origin, but rather a Dental clicks with a subscript dot, the dot being the old diacritic for retroflex consonants. Prior to 1989, (stretched c) was the IPA letter for the alveolar clicks, and this is still preferred by some phoneticians. The tail of may be the tail of retroflex consonants in the IPA, and thus analogous to the underdot of .Pullum & Ladusaw, Phonetic Symbol Guide, p. 34 Either letter may be combined with a second letter to indicate the manner of articulation, though this is commonly omitted for tenuis consonant clicks.
tenuis alveolar click | |||
aspirated alveolar click | |||
voiced alveolar click | |||
alveolar nasal click | |||
aspirated alveolar nasal click | |||
glottalized alveolar nasal click | |||
tenuis alveolar click | |||
aspirated alveolar click | |||
voiced alveolar click | |||
alveolar nasal click | |||
aspirated alveolar nasal click | |||
glottalized alveolar nasal click |
The last can be heard in the sound sample at right; non-native speakers tend to glottalize clicks to avoid nasalizing them. The nasal click may also be heard at the right.
In the orthographies of individual languages, the letters and digraphs for alveolar clicks may be based on either the vertical bar symbol of the IPA, , or on the Latin of Bantu convention. Khoekhoe and most Bushman languages use the former; Naro language, Sandawe language, and Zulu language use the latter.
!Kung | nǃan | 'inside' | |||
Hadza language | la qo | 'to trip' | |||
ke qhena | 'to be slow' | ||||
he nqee | 'dead leopard' | ||||
te qqe | 'to carry' | ||||
Sandawe language | gqokomi | 'greater kudu' | may have a slapped release: | ||
Sotho language | ho qo qa | 'to chat/converse' | Contrasts with Breathy voice, aspirated, and alveolar nasal clicks. See Sotho phonology | ||
Xhosa language | i qanda | 'egg' | Contrasts with Breathy voice, aspirated, and alveolar nasal clicks | ||
Taa language | ǃqhàà | 'water' | An aspirated linguo-pulmonic stop | ||
Zulu language | i qa qa | 'polecat' | Contrasts with breathy voice, aspirated, and alveolar nasal clicks. |
Clement Doke also noted a palatal click with slapped release, .Clement Doke (1925) An outline of the phonetics of the language of the ʗhũ̬꞉ Bushman of the North-West Kalahari. Bantu Studies 2: 129–166.
Nasal clicks that fit this description are used by speakers of Gan Chinese (from Ningdu county) and of Mandarin (from Beijing and Jilin), and presumably people from other parts of the country, with varying degrees of competence in nursery rhymes for the words for 'goose' and 'duck', both of which begin with in Gan and until recently began with in Mandarin as well. In Gan, the nursery rhyme is (disregarding tone),
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