click consonant

Syllable breakdown

Dictionary meaning

a speech sound produced by creating a vacuum in the mouth by making two simultaneous closures — one at the back of the mouth with the tongue or velum and one at the front — then releasing the forward closure to create a sharp ingressive airstream; click consonants are a defining phonological feature of the Khoisan language families of southern Africa, including !Kung, ǀXam, and Sandawe, and have been borrowed into several Bantu languages including Zulu and Xhosa where they function as ordinary consonants; the extraordinary diversity of click types — dental, alveolar, palatal, lateral, retroflex — makes the Khoisan languages phonologically among the most complex in the world; genetic evidence suggests click languages may represent some of the oldest lineages of human speech