ǃ The alveolar or postalveolar clicks are a family of click consonants found only in Africa and in the Damin ritual jargon of Australia.
The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents the place of articulation of these sounds is ǃ. The symbol is not an exclamation mark in origin, but rather a pipe with a subscript dot ( ǀ̣ ), the old diacritic for retroflex consonants. This may be combined with a symbol for the manner of articulation, though this is commonly omitted for tenuis clicks. Common alveolar clicks are:
[ǃ] tenuis alveolar click
[ǃʰ] aspirated alveolar click
[ᶢǃ] voiced alveolar click
[ᵑǃ] nasal alveolar click
[ᵑ̊ǃʰ] aspirated nasal alveolar click
[ǃˀ] or [ᵑ̊ǃˀ] glottalized alveolar click
The last is what is heard in the sound sample at right, as non-native speakers tend to glottalize clicks to avoid nasalizing them.
Prior to 1989, [ʗ] was the IPA representation of the tenuis postalveolar click. The tail of ʗ may be the tail of retroflex consonants in the IPA, and thus analogous to the underdot of ǃ. Xn--ija.net~Site InfoWhoisTrace RouteRBL Check
