Click Consonant - The Airstream

The Airstream

The essence of a click is a lingual ingressive airstream mechanism. However, in nasal clicks the nasalization involves a separate nasal airstream, generally pulmonic egressive but occasionally pulmonic ingressive. Similarly, voiced clicks also require a simultaneous pulmonic egressive airstream to power the voiced phonation.

The front articulation may be coronal or, rarely, labial. The front and rear articulations are interdependent, with the rear contact being uvular or pharyngeal, depending on the shape of the front of the tongue, in languages in which this has been investigated.

The rear articulation had been thought to be velar, with a few languages contrasting a uvular place of articulation. However, recent investigations of languages with very complex click systems such as Nǁng have revealed that the supposed velar–uvular contrast is actually a contrast of a simple clicks versus click–plosive airstream contours (or consonant clusters, depending on analysis). Even in languages without such a distinction, such as Xhosa, experiments have shown that when the click release is removed from a recording, the resulting sound is judged to be uvular, not velar. In related Zulu, though nasal assimilation is velar, that only indicates that the onset of the rear articulation is velar; the release is still uvular. Therefore, although not all languages have been investigated on this point, phoneticians have recently come to use the term lingual (made with the tongue) as being more accurate for this airstream mechanism than velaric (made at the velum).