Alveolar click

The alveolar or postalveolar clicks are a family of click consonants found only in Africa 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 of these sounds is Template:Angbr IPA. The symbol is not an exclamation mark in origin, but rather a vertical bar with a subscript dot, the dot being the old diacritic for retroflex consonants. Prior to 1989, Template:Angbr IPA (stretched c) was the IPA letter for the alveolar clicks, and this is still preferred by some phoneticians. The tail of Template:Angbr IPA may be the tail of retroflex consonants in the IPA, and thus analogous to the underdot of Template:Angbr IPA. Either letter may be combined with a second letter to indicate the manner of articulation, though this is commonly omitted for tenuis clicks.

Alveolar click consonants and their transcription

In official IPA transcription, the click letter is combined with a Template:Angbr IPA via a tie bar, though Template:Angbr IPA is frequently omitted. Many authors instead use a superscript Template:Angbr IPA without the tie bar, again often neglecting the Template:Angbr IPA. 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 in these three transcriptions are:

Trans. I	Trans. II	Trans. III	Description
(velar)
Template:Angbr IPA	Template:Angbr IPA	Template:Angbr IPA	tenuis alveolar click
Template:Angbr IPA	Template:Angbr IPA	Template:Angbr IPA	aspirated alveolar click
Template:Angbr IPA	Template:Angbr IPA	Template:Angbr IPA	voiced alveolar click
Template:Angbr IPA	Template:Angbr IPA	Template:Angbr IPA	alveolar nasal click
Template:Angbr IPA	Template:Angbr IPA	Template:Angbr IPA	aspirated alveolar nasal click
Template:Angbr IPA	Template:Angbr IPA	Template:Angbr IPA	glottalized alveolar nasal click
(uvular)
Template:Angbr IPA	Template:Angbr IPA		tenuis alveolar click
Template:Angbr IPA	Template:Angbr IPA		aspirated alveolar click
Template:Angbr IPA	Template:Angbr IPA		voiced alveolar click
Template:Angbr IPA	Template:Angbr IPA		alveolar nasal click
Template:Angbr IPA	Template:Angbr IPA		aspirated alveolar nasal click
Template:Angbr IPA	Template:Angbr IPA		glottalized alveolar nasal click

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, Template:Angbr IPA, or on the Latin Template:Angbr 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 place of articulation is alveolar or postalveolar, depending on the language, and apical, which means it is articulated with the tip of the tongue against the alveolar ridge or the roof of the mouth behind the alveolar ridge. (Damin contrasted these two articulations as separate phonemes.) 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 mimesis, as a sound children use to imitate a horse trotting.

Language		Word	IPA	Meaning	Notes
!Kung		nǃan		'inside'
Hadza				'to trip'
				'to be slow'
				'dead leopard'
				'to carry'
Sandawe				'greater kudu'	may have a slapped release:
Sotho				'to chat/converse'	Contrasts with murmured, aspirated, and alveolar nasal clicks. See Sotho phonology
Xhosa				'egg'	Contrasts with murmured, aspirated, and alveolar nasal clicks
ǃXóõ				'water'	An aspirated linguo-pulmonic stop
Zulu			=	'polecat'	Contrasts with murmured, aspirated, and alveolar nasal clicks.

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 Template:Angbr IPA in the extensions to the IPA; a slapped click is therefore transcribed Template:Angbr IPA or Template:Angbr IPA (or Template:Angbr IPA). The percussive allophones of the five Sandawe alveolar clicks are (or etc.).

(Clement Doke also noted a palatal click with slapped release, .)

Nasal clicks that fit this description are used by speakers of Gan Chinese (from Ningdu county) and of Mandarin (from Beijing and Jilin), 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),

天一隻鵝 'a goose in the sky'

地下一隻鴨 'a duck on the ground'

鵝生鵝蛋鵝孵鵝 'a goose lays a goose egg, a goose hatches a goose'

鴨生鴨蛋鴨孵鴨 'a duck lays a duck egg, a duck hatches a duck'

where the onsets are all pronounced .

"Fricated" alveolar clicks

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

See also

• Bilabial click
• Dental click
• Lateral click
• Palatal click
• Retroflex click
• Index of phonetics articles

External links

• Template:Phoible