LCTL of the Month: Xhosa

Above is a recording of "The Click Song," also known as "Qongqothwane" as sung by the legendary South African singer Miriam Makeba. The popping or clucking sounds you hear are not artistic embellishments, but part of the words in the lyrics.  The language she is signing in is Xhosa, one of the major languages of South Africa and this month's Less Commonly Taught Language of the Month Club offering.

Xhosa is spoken by approximately 7.8 million people and only a small fraction of that number live outside South Africa.  Known as isiXhosa to its speakers, this Bantu language has many distinctive features: it is a tonal language like Chinese, uses agglutinative morphology like Turkish and has 15 different genders of nouns (take that Spanish!).  But, what we will be discussing today, are the click consonants.

The name of the language itself starts with one of these clicks, confirming a linguistic phenomenon I have come to call DeJong's Maxim:

If you are going to have an unusual sound in your language, make sure you put it in the name of your language.

True not only for Xhosa, but also Ewe and Arabic.  But, what are these click sounds? What other languages use them?  And why are they only found in one small area of the globe? We will attempt to answer these questions, and explore a bit of the history of languages in South Africa in this Month's edition of the Schendo's Bad Grammar Less Commonly Taught Language (LCTL) of the Month Club.

Xhosa uses three letters to represent three basic click sounds: C, X and Q. The C-click is technically a dental click which sounds like the "tsk-tsk" sound one uses when reprimanding someone.  The X-click is a lateral click like the" tchick-tchick" used to urge on a horse (or so I'm told).  Finally, the Q-click is called a palatal click and can be easily produced by imitating the "clip-clop" sound of a horse.

(You can hear and practice all the Xhosa basic clicks here)

All three of these sounds share a common feature.  By using the back and the front of the tongue, a pocket of air is created in the mouth.  When the air pocket is sealed and the tongue is moved forward, the air pressure decreases.  At last, the front part of the tongue is pulled away like a cork from a wine bottle, breaking the seal and letting air rush into the mouth.  The result is the loudest sounds used in any language.

A click, however, is only a way of making noise, not a sound itself.  It is like the lip-popping motion used by English speakers to produce a P-sound.  If the same motion is used with the vocal chords vibrating, it will create a B-sound instead.  As you no doubt remember from our LCTL of the Month for Februrary 2010, Sanskrit makes four language sounds from the same motion and various combination of voice and "breathy-ness": P, Ph, B and Bh.

Likewise, Xhosa speakers can modify their clicks six different ways.  That gives a grand total of 18 (= 3 X 6) distinct clicks.  That may sound impressive, but is easily out done by several neighboring languages.  Besides both adhering to DeJong's Maxim, Ju|'hoansi has 48 clicks and ǃXóõ has 83!

I mention these other languages because Xhosa speakers appear to have borrowed click sounds from the speakers of languages like Ju|'hoansi and ǃXóõ.  These languages, which are lumped together in a group called Khosian languages, were spoken by the original inhabitants of south Africa.  When the Xhosa and other groups (like the Zulu) moved into the neighborhood they must have mixed and mingled. According to the Ethnologue, 15% of Xhosa words came from these languages (which are lumped together in a group called Khoisan languages).  It makes sense that they learned to pronounce a click or two (or 18).

This fact only deepens the remaining mystery of the click sounds.  Despite being very loud and not so difficult to pronounce (at least with a lifetime of practice)... despite having spread at least once from a click-language to a non-click language... despite being used nonlinguistically all over the world (think: "tsk-tsk" or "clip-clop")... languages with click sounds are still only found in southern Africa.

I should hope that it would go without saying that none of these click languages are "primitive" simply because they are exotic, but I will anyway.  Xhosa is the language of Nobel Prize winners Desmond Tutu and the first black President of South Africa, Nelson Mandela.  Not to mention to daily speech of 7.8 million people who argue, tell jokes and go to work every day. Which is the great lesson of the LCTL's, despite the very different ways we communicate, it is the same human voice speaking.