Tenuis lateral click

(Tenuis) lateral click
ǁ
ʖ
IPA number 180, 203
Encoding
Entity (decimal) ǁʖ
Unicode (hex) U+01C1U+0296
Kirshenbaum l![1]
Sound
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Main article: Lateral clicks

The voiceless or more precisely tenuis lateral click is a click consonant found primarily among the languages of southern Africa. The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents this sound is ǁ. The Doke/Beach convention, adopted for a time by the IPA and still preferred by some linguists, is ʖ.[2]

Features

Features of the tenuis lateral click:

Occurrence

Tenuis lateral clicks are found primarily in the various Khoisan language families of southern Africa and in some neighboring Bantu languages.

Language Word IPA Meaning
Hadza exekeke [ʔeǁekeke] = [ʔeʖekeke]'to listen'
Khoekhoe ǂamǁgû[ᵑǂ͡ʔàm̀ǁṹṹ] = [ǂ̃ˀàm̀ʖṹṹ]'to inadvertently bite a hard object'
Zulu xoxa [ǁɔ́ːǁa] = [ʖɔ́ːʖa]'to converse'

Notes

  1. Kirshenbaum, Evan. "FAQ: Representing IPA Phonetics in ASCII (Appendix D)".
  2. Styled as either a digit 5 with the top removed, or an inverted glottal stop ʔ. It perhaps derives from a cedilla written the size of a full letter.
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