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Some Africans click, but English speakers don’t. That’s been the conventional wisdom about click sounds, which serve as regular consonants in Zulu and Xhosa and a few other African languages but which were presumed to just be used in English for encouraging a horse, imitating a kiss, or expressing emotions such as disapproval or amazement. But researchers have recently found that clicks are far more prevalent in the world’s lingua franca than had been thought.
Speakers, it turns out, use clicks for a previously overlooked purpose: as a form of verbal punctuation in between thoughts or phrases. Melissa Wright of Birmingham City University in England recently analyzed click sounds in six large sets of recorded English conversations. She found that speakers used clicks frequently to signal that they were ending one stretch of conversation and shifting to a new one. For example, a speaker might say, “Yeah, that was a great game,” produce a click, then say, “The reason I’m calling is to invite you to dinner tomorrow.”
This pattern, which occurred for both British and American speakers, suggests that clicks have a meaning similar to saying “anyway” or “so.” That is, clicks provide us with a phonetic resource to organize conversations and communicate our intentions to listeners. This finding had previously eluded linguists, whose research often focuses on words and sentences in isolation. Wright was able to uncover the new pattern because she analyzed clicks in the context of complete conversations, suggesting that this method could be important for making new discoveries about the nature of language.
These results, published in the Journal of the International Phonetic Association, could shake up current thinking about the origin of language. On the basis of linguistic and genetic data, some researchers have claimed that the ancestral population of humans lived in Africa and spoke a click language. As languages farther and farther away from Africa are examined, they argue, clicks become less and less integral, suggesting they are relics that have been lost as humans migrated away from their homeland and diversified their speech. Wright’s research, however, shows that clicks can be important even in a modern language very far from Africa.
This discovery opens up the possibility that clicks are not relics at all but are flexible linguistic tools that can help meet the communication needs of any human population.
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12 Comments
Add CommentI think the author is looking for a needle in the haystack. I talk to a lot of people all over the world, but most of the people I talk to are in the US, and I have never heard anyone use clicks to represent words. I have heard a lot of people use pause sounds while they collected their thoughts, but the pause sounds are not clicks. I do not think the author is going to achieve her objective by getting people run around clicking to each other or start a new language that use clicks to communicate to each other like the hand-full of people do in Africa.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisHmmmm... click. I'm going to listen out for that today in conversation. click clack. to see if I see anyone doing it.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIf author is referring to sounds like sucking your teeth, a throat-produced nasal hum - or other noises like that, then I agree.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI'm very surprised at this article. It is making a profound mistake. The clicks the author refers to in African languages are what we phonologists call "phonemes," which are the segments which constitute the pronunciation units of words, sort of like mental "letters." The clicking sounds that occur in English do not play that sort of role at all. If this author is the Anne Pycha I know, a phonologist herself, then I am totally surprised and dismayed.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisSince English does not use "clicks" as phonemes, I probably would not recongnize one if I heard it. Can someone provide a recording of snippets of African conversation containing clicks, so I'd know what they sound like.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThose extended hmmmms and hand gestures during which people (mostly female?) collect their thoughts are soooo irritating. Men think BEFORE they talk.
There's nothing new to the insight that English uses clicks; they are represented in writing by Tsk-Tsk or Tut-Tut. (Vide _Intl. Encycl. of Linguistics_). What is new is that clicks are found to be group markers, and hence, as the article says, are more widely used than was previously thought.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThis finding is relevant for the linguistic expansion theory, as the final paragraphs of the article indicate.
Whether these clicks are phonemes or not is irrelevant: they are language sounds, and that *is* relevant. Incidentally, phonemes are not a sort of mental letters; they are meaning-distinctive sounds in a language.
Hasn't anyone heard of Victor Borge (Boing-pop)?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI think it is relevant that these sounds are not phonemes, or sounds that are used to keep words distinct from each other. This article describes sounds emitted by English speakers for various conversational purposes, NOT for maintaining lexical distinctions. It is a category error to confound them. Dispersion theory, which is controversial and, IMHO, rests on shaky empirical grounds, relates to phoneme inventories.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThe article does not say that clicks are phonemes; it says "phonetic resources". Additionally, it touches on a wider use of clicks than was previously thought, and it says something about method. Nothing wrong with all that.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI have been reading Scientific American since I was in high school (class of '53), and used to put a great deal of credibility in it. However, when I became a professional linguist myself and began reading SciAm articles within my areas of expertise, my credulity waned pretty fast. This article accelerates this process. Of course, part of the problem is that many people think they can pontificate about language without bothering to educate themselves about the findings of the field in the last 150 years or so; Sciam articles about physics, chemistry and the like are probably more credible.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIf you want to know more about clicks, go here http://www.cunyphonologyforum.net/endan.php and scroll down to the Miller, Amanda article. If you click on her slides you'll get more info about clicks, and the recordings should come through. You can also hear her talk, and she illustrates them.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThis is pretty technical, but a google search should yield more accessible info.
To reply to the specific content of Bessel Dekker's defense of the article in question. The "phonetic resources" available to humans are the human vocal tract, which is common to all humans. It's a finite resource. It's to be expected (and hence of no scientific interest) that speakers of diverse languages pick phonetic resources that are not contrastive in their language to employ as conversational markers. Two comments about "method": any method worth its salt should be based on sound scientific reasoning and based on the findings of the field; any method that leads to such a flawed result should be rethought.
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