Bilabial clicks
|
Labial click (plain) |
|||
|---|---|---|---|
| ʘ | |||
| IPA number | 176 | ||
| Encoding | |||
| Entity (decimal) | ʘ |
||
| Unicode (hex) | U+0298 | ||
| X-SAMPA | O\ |
||
| Kirshenbaum | p! |
||
| Braille |
 
|
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| Sound | |||
|
|
|||
| Voiced labial click | |
|---|---|
| ʘ̬ | |
| ᶢʘ | |
| Encoding | |
| X-SAMPA | O\_t |
| Kirshenbaum | b! |
| Nasal labial click | |
|---|---|
| ʘ̃ | |
| ᵑʘ ᵐʘ | |
| Encoding | |
| X-SAMPA | O\_~ |
| Kirshenbaum | m! |
The labial or bilabial clicks are a family of click consonants that sound something like a smack of the lips. They are found as phonemes only in the small Tuu language family (currently two languages, one moribund), in the ǂHõã language of Botswana (also moribund), and in the extinct Damin ritual jargon of Australia. However, bilabial clicks are found paralinguistically for a kiss in various languages, and as allophones of labial–velar stops in some West African languages (Ladefoged 1968), as of /mw/ in some of the languages neighboring Shona, such as Ndau and Tonga.
The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents the place of articulation of these sounds is ⟨ʘ⟩. This may be combined with a second letter to indicate the manner of articulation, though this is commonly omitted for tenuis clicks, and increasingly a diacritic is used instead. Common labial clicks are:
The last is what is heard in the sound sample at right, as non-native speakers tend to glottalize clicks to avoid nasalizing them.
Damin also had an egressive bilabial [ʘ↑], the world's only attested egressive click.
Features of ingressive labial clicks:
The labial clicks are sometimes erroneously described as sounding like a kiss. However, they do not have the pursed lips of a kiss. Instead, the lips are compressed, more like a [p] than a [w], and they sound more like a noisy smack of the lips than a kiss.
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