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Slightly related: I've always loved the clicking sounds used in a number of (South) African languages. Xhosa for example has 6 different clicking sounds [0]. I
by 0xdeadb00f 5y ago
Slightly related: I've always loved the clicking sounds used in a number of (South) African languages. Xhosa for example has 6 different clicking sounds [0].
It's so surprising to me that English and most other languages don't make use of any clicking sounds whatsoever.
0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xhosa_language https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xhosa_language
- bradrn 5y agoYep, this is a really interesting question. I had a long discussion about this on another forum, and it turns out linguists really have no idea why clicks are restricted to African languages. The best we could come up with was that click sounds are just too difficult to evolve — there’s no easy way for some random English sound (for instance) to turn into a click. On the other hand, if a neighbouring language has click sounds, that can start to provide almost a ‘pathway’ for clicks to come into the language.
- gfaure 5y agoEnglish does use clicks, as paralinguistic sounds. The first paragraph of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Click_consonant https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Click_consonant has a couple of examples.
- bradrn 5y agoBut English clicks are not phonemic consonants in the same way they are in Xhosa and Khoekhoe — that is, clicks are not part of words in English, whereas they are in those languages. (Even the language name Xhosa begins with a click.)