Lateral click
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The lateral clicks are a family of
click consonant Click consonants, or clicks, are speech sounds that occur as consonants in many languages of Southern Africa and in three languages of East Africa. Examples familiar to English-speakers are the ''tut-tut'' (British spelling) or '' tsk! tsk!'' ...
s found only in African languages. The clicking sound used by equestrians to urge on their
horse The horse (''Equus ferus caballus'') is a domesticated, one-toed, hoofed mammal. It belongs to the taxonomic family Equidae and is one of two extant subspecies of ''Equus ferus''. The horse has evolved over the past 45 to 55 million yea ...
s is a lateral click, although it is not a speech sound in that context. Lateral clicks are found throughout southern Africa, for example in Zulu, and in some languages in Tanzania and Namibia. The place of articulation is not known to be contrastive in any language, and typically varies from alveolar to palatal. The symbol in the
International Phonetic Alphabet The International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) is an alphabetic system of phonetic notation based primarily on the Latin script. It was devised by the International Phonetic Association in the late 19th century as a standardized representation ...
that represents a generic lateral click is , a double vertical bar. Prior to 1989, was the IPA letter for the lateral clicks, and this is still preferred by some phoneticians, as the vertical bar may be confounded with prosody marks and, in some fonts, with a double lowercase L. Either letter may be combined with a second letter to indicate the
manner of articulation In articulatory phonetics, the manner of articulation is the configuration and interaction of the articulators ( speech organs such as the tongue, lips, and palate) when making a speech sound. One parameter of manner is ''stricture,'' that is ...
, though this is commonly omitted for tenuis clicks. In official IPA transcription, the click letter is combined with a via a tie bar, though is frequently omitted. Many authors instead use a superscript without the tie bar, again often neglecting the . Either letter, whether baseline or superscript, is usually placed before the click letter, but may come after when the release of the velar or uvular occlusion is audible. A third convention is the click letter with diacritics for voicelessness, voicing and nasalization; it does not distinguish velar from uvular lateral clicks. Common lateral clicks are: The last is what is heard in the sound sample above, as non-native speakers tend to glottalize clicks to avoid nasalizing them. In the orthographies of individual languages, the letters and digraphs for lateral clicks may be based on either the vertical bar symbol of the IPA, , or on the Latin of Bantu convention. Nama and most Saan languages use the former; Naro, Sandawe, and Zulu use the latter.


Features

The specific articulation of lateral clicks may vary from language to language, from dental to palatal, apical or laminal, though no contrast between such articulations has been confirmed apart from the retroflex clicks, which may have lateral release. Features of lateral clicks: * The release of the forward place of articulation is a noisy,
affricate An affricate is a consonant that begins as a stop and releases as a fricative, generally with the same place of articulation (most often coronal). It is often difficult to decide if a stop and fricative form a single phoneme or a consonant pai ...
-like sound in southern Africa, but abrupt in Hadza and Sandawe in East Africa. * They are
lateral consonant A lateral is a consonant in which the airstream proceeds along one or both of the sides of the tongue, but it is blocked by the tongue from going through the middle of the mouth. An example of a lateral consonant is the English ''L'', as in ''Larr ...
s, which means they are produced by releasing the airstream at the side of the tongue, rather than in the middle. Some speakers pronounce them on one side of the mouth, some on both. Regarding Khoekhoe, Tindall notes that European learners almost invariably pronounce these sounds as simple laterals, by placing the tongue against the side teeth, and that this articulation is "harsh and foreign to the native ear". The Namaqua instead cover the whole of the palate with the tongue, and produce the sound "as far back in the palate as possible".


Occurrence

English English usually refers to: * English language * English people English may also refer to: Peoples, culture, and language * ''English'', an adjective for something of, from, or related to England ** English national ...
does not have a lateral click (or any click consonant, for that matter) as a phoneme, but an unreleasedIn the English sound, the velar closure is not released, unlike the released sounds found in languages that combine clicks with vowels. lateral click does occur as an interjection, usually written ''tchick!'' or ''tchek!'' (and often reduplicated ''tchick-tchick!''), used to urge a horse to move. A form of click can also be heard by some English speakers whe
scoffing
but this is generally a dental click rather than a lateral click.


See also

* Fricated palatal click (described as having a lateral release) * Retroflex click (has a fricated lateral release)


References

*


External links

* {{IPA navigation Alveolar consonants Click consonants Lateral consonants