Let’s Talk About Clicks

The Khoisan languages receive a lot of attention because of how rare click phonemes are to the world’s ears. In all of the world’s languages, only a handful implement clicking sounds.

Photo by Craig Foster: https://www.haaretz.com/archaeology/MAGAZINE-73-000-year-old-abstract-art-found-in-south-africa-s-blombos-cave-1.6468244

As a linguist, one of the common questions I receive is about the “click languages”. This isn’t the most frequent of…