The 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, in the ǂ’Amkoe language of Botswana, and in the extinct Damin ritual jargon of Australia. However, bilabial clicks are found paralinguistically for a kiss in various languages, including integrated into a greeting in the Hadza language of Tanzania, and as allophones of labial–velar stops in some West African languages, 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. 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, which may be an egressive click.
Features
Features of ingressive labial clicks:
The forward place of articulation is labial, which means it is articulated with the lips. The release is a noisy, affricate-like sound. Bilabial articulation, using both lips, is typical. Sometimes this may pass through a labio-dental stage as the click is released, making it noisier. In other cases, the lower lip may start out in contact with both the upper teeth and the upper lip.
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 than a, and they sound more like a noisy smack of the lips than a kiss.
It was never widely used and was eventually dropped for. Still the deprecated IPA character is encoded at. Earlier it is privately encoded by SIL International at and is available in SIL supporting fonts.
Occurrence
does not have a labial click as a phoneme, but a plain bilabial click does occur in mimesis, as a lip-smacking sound children use to imitate a fish. Labial clicks only occur in the Tuu and Kx'a families of southern Africa, and in the Australian ritual language Damin.
Origins
Labial clicks may have arisen historically from labialization of other places of articulation. Starostin notes that the ǂ’Amkoe words for 'one' and 'two', and, have labial clicks whereas no other Khoisan language has a labial consonant of any kind in its words for these numerals, and Starostin and Sands reconstruct a series of labialized clicks in Proto-Kxʼa, which became labial clicks in ǂ’Amkoe. In Hadza, the word for 'kiss',, becomes a mimetic or in greetings.
