Tenuis lateral click
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| (Tenuis) lateral click | |
|---|---|
| ǁ | |
| ʖ | |
| IPA Number | 180, 203 |
| Encoding | |
| Entity (decimal) | ǁʖ |
| Unicode (hex) | U+01C1 U+0296 |
| Braille |   |
| Audio sample | |
The voiceless or more precisely tenuis lateral click is a click consonant found primarily among the languages of southern Africa. The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents this sound is ⟨ǁ⟩. The Doke/Beach convention, adopted for a time by the IPA and still preferred by some linguists, is ⟨ʖ⟩.[1]
Features[edit]
Features of the tenuis lateral click:
- 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.
- Its phonation is voiceless, unaspirated, and unglottalized, which means it is produced without vibration or constriction of the vocal cords, and any following vowel starts without significant delay.
- It is an oral consonant, which means air is allowed to escape through the mouth only.
- It is a lateral consonant, which means it is produced by directing the airstream over the sides of the tongue, rather than down the middle.
Occurrence[edit]
Tenuis lateral clicks are found primarily in the various Khoisan language families of southern Africa and in some neighboring Bantu languages.
| Language | Word | IPA | Meaning |
|---|---|---|---|
| Hadza | exekeke | [ʔeǁekeke] = [ʔeʖekeke] | 'to listen' |
| Khoekhoe | ǂamǁgû | [ᵑǂ͡ʔàm̀ǁṹṹ] = [ǂ̃ˀàm̀ʖṹṹ] | 'to inadvertently bite a hard object' |
| Zulu | xoxa | [ǁɔːǁa] = [ʖɔːʖa] | 'to converse' |
