Pulmonic Initiation
Initiation by means of the lungs (actually the diaphragm and ribs) is called pulmonic initiation. The vast majority of sounds used in human languages are pulmonic egressives. In most languages, including all the languages of Europe (excluding the Caucasus), all phonemes are pulmonic egressives.
The only attested use of a phonemic pulmonic ingressive is a lateral fricative in Damin, a ritual language formerly used by speakers of Lardil in Australia. This can be written with the extended version of the International Phonetic Alphabet as . !Xóõ has ingression as a phonetic detail in one series of its clicks, which are ingressive voiceless nasals with delayed aspiration, . Peter Ladefoged considers these to be among the most difficult sounds in the world. Other languages, for example in Taiwan, have been claimed to have pulmonic ingressives, but these claims have either proven to be spurious or to be occasional phonetic detail.
In interjections, but not in normal words, pulmonic ingressive vowels such as frequently occur in Scandinavian languages, e.g. Swedish, and contrary to the common view that pulmonic ingressive speech is restricted to northern Europe, speech technologist Robert Eklund has recently shown that it occurs on most continents, in a wide variety of languages of different typological origins, e.g. Ewe. In Ewe, is used for back-channeling, to indicate that one is listening (like ah or I see in English). See ingressive sound for details.
Read more about this topic: Airstream Mechanism
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