Tut tut. Giddy up. That little kiss-squeak you make at a cat. English speakers produce clicks all the time; we just refuse to let them into words. In parts of southern and eastern Africa, clicks are ordinary consonants, as normal as p or t.
How a click works
To make one, you close your mouth in two places, usually with the back of the tongue against the soft palate and the front somewhere further forward. Lower the tongue in between, and a tiny pocket of low pressure forms. Release the front closure and air rushes in with a sharp pop. That is the click.
According to the World Atlas of Language Structures, hosted by the Max Planck Institute, clicks occur in all the Khoisan languages of southern Africa. Some, such as !Xóõ, have remarkably large sets of them. The spellings even borrow symbols like !, | and // to write them.
Borrowed sounds
Clicks also turn up in Bantu languages such as Xhosa and Zulu. Linguists trace this to long and close contact with Khoisan-speaking communities, and research in the journal Language Dynamics and Change has examined how that prehistoric contact shaped the region's languages. Sounds, it turns out, can be borrowed as easily as words.
Why it matters in your classroom
Students often believe their mouths simply cannot make the French r or the Spanish j. Clicks prove otherwise: everyone can already produce them, they have just been filed under "noises". Pronunciation is a habit, not a gift. Try teaching a click on a Friday afternoon and watch the room come alive.
