Click Consonant - Types of Clicks

Types of Clicks

Like other consonants, clicks can be described using four parameters: place of articulation, manner of articulation, phonation (including glottalization), and airstream mechanism. As noted above, clicks necessarily involve at least two closures, which in some cases operate partially independently: an anterior articulation which has traditionally been represented by the special click symbol in the IPA, and a posterior articulation which has been traditionally described as oral or nasal, voiced or voiceless, etc. The literature also describes a contrast between velar and uvular rear articulations for some languages. However, recent work has shown that for languages which make this distinction, all clicks have a uvular, or even pharyngeal, rear closure, and that the clicks explicitly described as uvular are in fact clusters/contours of a click plus a pulmonic or ejective component, in which the cluster/contour has two release bursts, the forward (click) and then the rearward (uvular) component. In the case of "velar" clicks in these languages, there is only a single release burst, that of the forward click release, and the release of the rear articulation isn't separately audible (Miller 2011).

Nonetheless, in most of the literature the stated place of the click is the anterior articulation (called the release or influx), while the manner is ascribed to the posterior articulation (called the accompaniment or efflux). The anterior articulation defines the click type and is written with the IPA letter for the click (dental ⟨ǀ⟩, alveolar ⟨ǃ⟩, etc.), while the traditional term 'accompaniment' conflates the categories of manner (nasal, affricated), phonation (voiced, aspirated, breathy voiced, glottalized), as well as any change in the airstream with the release of the posterior articulation (pulmonic, ejective), all of which are transcribed with additional letters or diacritics, as in the nasal alveolar click, ⟨ǃŋ⟩ or ⟨ᵑǃ⟩ or—to take an extreme example—the voiced (uvular) ejective alveolar click, ⟨ᶢǃ͡qʼ⟩.

The size of click inventories ranges from as few as three (in Sesotho) or four (in Dahalo), to dozens in the Kx'a and Tuu (Northern and Southern Khoisan) languages. Taa, the last vibrant language in the latter family, has 45 to 115 click phonemes, depending on analysis (clusters vs. contours), and over 70% of words in the dictionary of this language begin with a click.

Clicks appear more stop-like (sharp/abrupt) or affricate-like (noisy) depending on their place of articulation: In southern Africa, clicks involving an apical alveolar or laminal postalveolar closure are acoustically abrupt and sharp, like stops, while labial, dental, and lateral clicks typically have longer and acoustically noisier releases that are superficially more like affricates. In East Africa, however, the alveolar clicks tend to be flapped, while the lateral clicks tend to be more sharp.