Dental (or more precisely denti-alveolar) clicks are a family of click consonants found, as constituents of words, only in Africa and in the Damin ritual jargon of Australia.
In English, the tut-tut! (British spelling, "tutting") or tsk! tsk! (American spelling, "tsking") sound used to express disapproval or pity is an unreleased dental click, although it is not a lexical phoneme (a sound that distinguishes words) in English but a paralinguistic speech-sound. Similarly paralinguistic usage of dental clicks is made in certain other languages, but the meaning thereof differs widely between many of the languages (e.g., affirmation in Somali but negation in many varieties of Arabic, Turkish and the languages of the Balkans).
The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents the place of articulation of these sounds is ⟨ǀ⟩, a vertical bar. Prior to 1989, ⟨ʇ⟩ was the IPA letter for the dental clicks. It is still occasionally used where the symbol ⟨ǀ⟩ would be confounded with other symbols, such as prosody marks, or simply because in many fonts the vertical bar is indistinguishable from a lowercase L or capital I. Either letter may be combined with a second letter or a diacritic to indicate voicing and the manner of articulation, though this is commonly omitted for tenuis clicks.
Transcription
In official IPA transcriptions, the click letter is combined with a ⟨kɡŋqɢɴ⟩ via a tie bar, though ⟨k⟩ is frequently omitted and assumed. Many authors instead use a superscript ⟨kɡŋqɢɴ⟩ without the tie bar, again often omitting ⟨k⟩. Either letter, whether baseline or superscript, is usually placed before the click letter, but may come after when the release of the velar or uvular occlusion is audible. A third convention is the click letter with diacritics for voicelessness, voicing and nasalization; this would require something like the guttural diacritic ◌̴ to distinguish uvular dental clicks. Common dental clicks in these three transcriptions 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.
In the orthographies of individual languages, the letters and digraphs for dental clicks may be based on either the vertical bar symbol of the IPA, ⟨ǀ⟩, or on the Latin ⟨c⟩ of Bantu convention. Nama and most Bushman languages use the former; Naro, Sandawe, and Zulu use the latter.
Features
Features of dental clicks:
The basic articulation may be voiced, nasal, aspirated, glottalized, etc.
Clicks may be oral or nasal, which means that the airflow is either restricted to the mouth, or passes through the nose as well.
They are median consonants, which means they are produced by releasing the airstream at the midline of the tongue, rather than at the sides.
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.
The Cushitic language Dahalo has four clicks, all of them nasalized: [ᵑ̊ʇ,ᵑʇ,ᵑ̊ʇʷ,ᵑʇʷ].
Dental clicks may also be used para-linguistically. For example, English speakers use a plain dental click, usually written tsk or tut (and often reduplicatedtsk-tsk or tut-tut; these spellings often lead to spelling pronunciations/tɪsk/ or /tʌt/), as an interjection to express commiseration, disapproval, irritation, or to call a small animal. German (ts or tss), Hungarian (cöccögés), Persian (noch), Portuguese (tsc), Russian (ts-ts-ts; sound file) Spanish (ts) and French (t-t-t-t) speakers use the dental click in a similar way as English.
The dental click is also used para-linguistically in Semitic languages such as Arabic, Hebrew and Indo-European Pashto, and Persian where it is transcribed as نچ/noch and is also used as a negative response to a "yes or no" question (including Dari and Tajiki). It is also used in some languages spoken in regions closer to, or in, Europe, such as Turkish, Albanian, Greek, Bulgarian, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish, Romanian or Serbo-Croatian to denote a negative response to a "yes or no" question. The dental click is sometimes accompanied by an upward motion of the head.
