The alveolar or postalveolar clicks are a family of click consonants found only in

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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 palatal clicks, making a hollower sound than those consonants. The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents the

place of articulation In articulatory phonetics, the place of articulation (also point of articulation) of a consonant is a location along the vocal tract where its production occurs. It is a point where a constriction is made between an active and a passive articul ...

of these sounds is . The symbol is not an

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in origin, but rather a vertical bar 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 . 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 alveolar clicks. Common alveolar clicks are: 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, Sandawe, and Zulu use the latter.

Features

Features of postalveolar clicks: *The forward

is alveolar or

postalveolar Postalveolar or post-alveolar consonants are consonants articulated with the tongue near or touching the ''back'' of the alveolar ridge. Articulation is farther back in the mouth than the alveolar consonants, which are at the ridge itself, but no ...

, depending on the language, and apical, which means it is articulated with the tip of the tongue against the

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or the roof of the mouth behind the alveolar ridge. (Damin contrasted these two articulations as separate

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s.) The release is a sharp, plosive sound in southern Africa, but in Sandawe it may be percussive, with the underside of the tip of the tongue striking the floor of the mouth after the release of the click (see below), and in Hadza the release is often quite weak.

Occurrence

English does not have an alveolar click (or any other click consonant) as a phoneme, but a plain alveolar click does occur in

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, as a sound children use to imitate a horse trotting.

Percussive release

In Sandawe, alveolar clicks commonly have a ballistic release, with the underside of the tip of the tongue subsequently striking the floor of the mouth. This allophone has been called "flapped" and "slapped". Sometimes the percussive slap is louder than the release, resulting in a sound that has been characterized as a "cluck". The symbol for the sublingual percussive component is in the extensions to the IPA; a slapped click is therefore transcribed or (or ). The percussive allophones of the five Sandawe alveolar clicks are (or ). Nasal clicks that fit this description are used by speakers of Gan Chinese (from Ningdu county) and of Mandarin (from Beijing and

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), 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), :' 'a goose in the sky' :' 'a duck on the ground' :' 'a goose lays a goose egg, a goose hatches a goose' :' 'a duck lays a duck egg, a duck hatches a duck' where the onsets are all pronounced .Geoffrey Nathan, 'Clicks in a Chinese Nursery Rhyme', JIPA (2001) 31/2.

"Fricated" alveolar clicks

A series of clicks in Ekoka !Kung have been variously described as retroflex or fricated palatal clicks.

References

External links