Five African Languages Use Sounds No European Tongue Was Built For

A click is made by sealing the tongue against the roof of the mouth at two points, lowering the body of the tongue to create a vacuum, and releasing one of the seals. Air rushes in. The resulting pop is louder, sharper, and more precisely placeable in the mouth than any sound in English. The languages of southern Africa use these sounds the way English uses 't' or 'k': as the basic consonants of ordinary words.

There are five primary click positions: dental (the disapproving 'tsk'), alveolar, palatal, lateral (the sound a rider makes to a horse), and bilabial. Each can be combined with voicing, nasalization, aspiration, glottal release, and uvular accompaniment. !Xóõ, a Khoisan language of the Kalahari documented in detail by Anthony Traill in the 1980s, has 48 distinct click phonemes — the largest known consonant inventory of any human language.

The puzzle is geographic. Clicks appear as core consonants only in southern Africa and in two East African outliers, Hadza and Sandawe. Nowhere else. Within southern Africa, the Khoisan languages have used them for as long as there are records. The Bantu-language families that arrived from the north and east — Xhosa, Zulu, Sotho, Ndebele — borrowed clicks from their Khoisan neighbors, integrating them into vocabulary acquired in close contact. The word Xhosa itself begins with a lateral click.

Why clicks emerged here and only here is unsettled. Genetic studies have suggested the speakers carry some of the deepest population branches on the human tree. Whether the sounds are equally ancient — a relic of a phonology lost everywhere else — or a regional innovation that simply did not spread, no one can yet say.