A typology of the use of clicks
Abstract
Click speech sounds were first identified as consonants in the 17th century. On his voyage to India in 1627, the English traveller and historian Sir Thomas Herbert stopped in southern Africa, where he met with Khoekhoe speakers at the Cape. He noticed that clicks were regular consonants in their language and represented them as such in his travelogue (Herbert 1638). Since then, click consonants have received thorough scholarly attention by linguists, many of whom have dedicated their lives to the study of click consonants. Click speech sounds are consonants in phoneme inventories of about 301 of the approximately 6,5002 languages spoken in the world today. These few languages, henceforth referred to as click-consonant-using (CU) languages, are found in southern and eastern Africa. In this squib we propose a typology of the different uses of click speech sounds in human communication.Downloads
Copyright (c) 2023 Matthias Brenzinger, Sheena Shah
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
Authors who publish with this journal agree to the following terms:- Authors retain copyright and grant the journal right of first publication with the work simultaneously licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution License that allows others to share the work with an acknowledgement of the work's authorship and initial publication in this journal.
- Authors are able to enter into separate, additional contractual arrangements for the non-exclusive distribution of the journal's published version of the work (e.g., post it to an institutional repository or publish it in a book), with an acknowledgement of its initial publication in this journal.
- Authors are permitted and encouraged to post their work online (e.g., in institutional repositories or on their website) prior to and during the submission process, as it can lead to productive exchanges, as well as earlier and greater citation of published work (See The Effect of Open Access).