Dental click


Dental clicks are a family of click consonants found, as constituents of words, only in Africa and in the Damin ritual jargon of Australia.
The tut-tut! or tsk! tsk! sound used to express disapproval or pity is a dental click, although, in this context, it is not a phoneme.
The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents the place of articulation of these sounds is, a vertical bar. Prior to 1989, was the IPA letter for the dental clicks. It is still occasionally used where the symbol would be confounded with other symbols, such as prosody marks, or simply because in many fonts the vertical bar is indistinguishable from an el or capital i. Either letter 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 dental 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.
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,, or on the Latin of Bantu convention. Nama and most Saan languages use the former; Naro, Sandawe, and Zulu use the latter.

Features

Features of dental clicks:
Dental clicks are common in Khoisan languages and the neighboring Nguni languages, such as Zulu and Xhosa. In the Nguni languages, the tenuis click is denoted by the letter c, the murmured click by gc, the aspirated click by ch, and the nasal click by nc. The prenasalized clicks are written ngc and nkc.
The Cushitic language Dahalo has four clicks, all of them nasalized:.
Dental clicks may also be used para-linguistically. For example, English speakers use a plain dental click, usually written tsk or tut, as an interjection to express commiseration, disapproval, irritation, or to call a small animal. German, Hungarian, Persian, Portuguese, Russian Spanish and French speakers use the dental click in exactly the same way as English.
The dental click is also used para-linguistically 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. 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 Serbian and 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.