Not to be confused with the retroflex clicks or palatal clicks. Unicode uses the obsolete descriptions of "retroflex click" for the alveolar-click character ⟨ǃ⟩ and "alveolar click" for the palatal-click character ⟨ǂ⟩.
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 ⟨ǃ⟩. 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, ⟨ʗ⟩ (stretched c) was the IPA letter for the alveolar clicks, and this is still preferred by some phoneticians. The tail of ⟨ʗ⟩ may be the tail of retroflex consonants in the IPA, and thus analogous to the underdot of ⟨ǃ⟩.[2] Either letter may be combined with a second letter to indicate the manner of articulation, though this is commonly omitted for tenuis clicks.
In official IPA transcription, the click letter is combined with a ⟨k ɡ ŋ q ɢ ɴ⟩ via a tie bar, though ⟨k⟩ is frequently omitted. Many authors instead use a superscript ⟨k ɡ ŋ q ɢ ɴ⟩ without the tie bar, again often neglecting the ⟨k⟩. 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, ⟨ǃ⟩, or on the Latin ⟨q⟩ of Bantu convention. Khoekhoe and most Bushman languages use the former; Naro, Sandawe, and Zulu use the latter.
Features
Features of postalveolar clicks:
The basic articulation may be voiced, nasal, aspirated, glottalized, etc.
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.
Clicks may be oral or nasal, which means that the airflow is either restricted to the mouth, or passes through the nose as well.
They are central consonants, which means they are produced by releasing the airstream at the center of the tongue, rather than at the sides.
The airstream mechanism is lingual ingressive (also known as velaric ingressive), which means a pocket of air trapped between two closures is rarefied by a "sucking" action of the tongue, rather than being moved by the glottis or the lungs/diaphragm. The release of the forward closure produces the "click" sound. Voiced and nasal clicks have a simultaneous pulmonic egressive airstream.
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.[3]
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.[4] 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 ⟨ǃ͡¡⟩ or ⟨ǃꜞ⟩ (or ⟨ʗ͡¡, ʗꜞ⟩). The percussive allophones of the five Sandawe alveolar clicks are [ᵏǃ͡¡,ᵏǃ͡¡ʰ,ᶢǃ͡¡,ᵑǃ͡¡,ᵑǃ͡¡ˀ] (or [ᵏʗꜞᵏʗꜞʰᶢʗꜞᵑʗꜞᵑʗꜞˀ] etc.).
(Clement Doke also noted a palatal click with slapped release, [ᵑǂ¡].)[5]
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 /ŋ/ in Gan and until recently began with /ŋ/ in Mandarin as well. In Gan, the nursery rhyme is (disregarding tone),
[tʰienitsʰakᵑǃ͡¡o] 天一隻鵝 'a goose in the sky'
[tihaitsʰakᵑǃ͡¡a] 地下一隻鴨 'a duck on the ground'
[ᵑǃ͡¡osaŋᵑǃ͡¡otʰan,ᵑǃ͡¡opʰauᵑǃ͡¡o] 鵝生鵝蛋鵝孵鵝 'a goose lays a goose egg, a goose hatches a goose'
[ᵑǃ͡¡asaŋᵑǃ͡¡atʰan,ᵑǃ͡¡apʰauᵑǃ͡¡a] 鴨生鴨蛋鴨孵鴨 'a duck lays a duck egg, a duck hatches a duck'
where the /ŋ/ onsets are all pronounced [ᵑǃ͡¡].[6]
^Tucker et al. (1977), The East-African Click Languages: A Phonetic Comparison
^Wright, Richard, Ian Maddieson, Peter Ladefoged, Bonny Sands (1995). "A phonetic study of Sandawe clicks", UCLA Working Papers in Phonetics, No. 91: Fieldwork Studies in Targeted Languages III.
^Clement Doke (1925) An outline of the phonetics of the language of the ʗhũ̬꞉ Bushman of the North-West Kalahari. Bantu Studies 2: 129–166.
^Geoffrey Nathan, 'Clicks in a Chinese Nursery Rhyme', JIPA (2001) 31/2.
