Tenuis lateral click

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]

Tenuis lateral velar click
k͡ǁ
ᵏʖ
IPA Number180, 203
Encoding
Entity (decimal)ǁʖ
Unicode (hex)U+01C1U+0296
Braille
Audio sample
source · help
Tenuis lateral uvular click
q͡ǁ
(etc)

Features

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

Tenuis lateral clicks are found primarily in the various Khoisan language families of southern Africa and in some neighboring Bantu languages.

LanguageWordIPAMeaning
Hadza exekeke[ʔeǁekeke] = [ʔeʖekeke]'to listen'
Khoekhoe ǂamǁgû[ᵑǂ͡ʔàm̀ǁṹṹ] = [ǂ̃ˀàm̀ʖṹṹ]'to inadvertently bite a hard object'
Xhosa inxeba[íŋǁeːɓa] = [íŋʖeːɓa]'wound' (noun)
Zulu xoxa[ǁɔːǁa] = [ʖɔːʖa]'to converse'
gollark: What? Intel Xe cards are said to be arriving in 2020.
gollark: I'm waiting for 2020 or so to upgrade. Mostly waiting for Intel dedicated GPUs to hopefully shake up the market.
gollark: It's like saying "Intel is better than AMD because Intel's Xeon Platinum 8280 beats AMD's best desktop CPU".
gollark: But for any realistic scenario cost matters.
gollark: Yes, Nvidia has the current highest performing card around.

References

  1. Styled as either a digit 5 with the top removed, or an inverted glottal stop ʔ. It perhaps derives from a cedilla written the size of a full letter.
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