Portal:Linguistics/Featured phone/January 2016
| Dental click (plain) | |||
|---|---|---|---|
| ǀ | |||
| ʇ | |||
| IPA Number | 177, 201 | ||
| Audio sample | |||
| Encoding | |||
| Entity (decimal) | ǀʇ | ||
| Unicode (hex) | U+01C0 U+0287 | ||
| X-SAMPA | |\ | ||
| Braille |   | ||
| |||
Dental (or more precisely denti-alveolar) 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! (British spelling, "tutting") or tsk! tsk! (American spelling, "tsking") sound used to express disapproval or pity is a dental click, although it is not a speech sound (phoneme) in that context.
The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents the place of articulation of these sounds is ⟨ǀ⟩, a pipe. Prior to 1989, ⟨ʇ⟩ was the IPA letter for the dental clicks. It is still occasionally used where the symbol ⟨ǀ⟩ would be confounded with other symbols, such as prosody marks, or simply because in many fonts the pipe 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.
In the orthographies of individual languages, the letters and digraphs for dental clicks may be based on either the pipe symbol of the IPA, ⟨ǀ⟩, or on the Latin ⟨c⟩ of Bantu convention. Nama and most Saan languages use the former; Naro, Sandawe, and Zulu use the latter.