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Click consonants, or clicks, are speech sounds that occur as consonants in many languages of Southern Africa and in three languages of East Africa. Examples familiar to English-speakers are the tut-tut or tsk! tsk! used to express disapproval or pity, the tchick! used to spur on a horse, and the clip-clop! sound children make with their tongue to imitate a horse trotting. However, these paralinguistic sounds in English are not full click consonants, as they only involve the front of the tongue, without the release of the back of the tongue that is required for clicks to combine with vowels and form syllables.
In linguistics and specifically phonology, a phoneme is any set of similar phones that, within a given language, is perceptually regarded as a single distinct sound and helps distinguish one word from another.
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Aushi, known by native speakers as Ikyaushi, is a Bantu language primarily spoken in the Lwapula Province of Zambia and the (Haut-)Katanga Province of the Democratic Republic of Congo. Although many scholars argue that it is a dialect of the closely related Bemba, native speakers insist that it is a distinct language. Nonetheless, speakers of both linguistic varieties enjoy extensive mutual intelligibility, particularly in the Lwapula Province.
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References
- ↑ Fwe at Ethnologue (18th ed., 2015) (subscription required)
- ↑ Jouni Filip Maho, 2009. New Updated Guthrie List Online
- ↑ Gunnink 2018, p. 4.
- ↑ Gunnink 2018, p. 5.
- ↑ Gunnink 2018, p. 5, 6.
- ↑ Gunnink 2018, p. 11, 12.
- ↑ Gunnink 2018, p. 13.
- ↑ Gunnink 2018, p. 19.
- ↑ Gunnink 2022, p. 32.
- ↑ Gunnink 2022, p. 74.
- Gunnink, Hilde (2018). A grammar of Fwe: a Bantu language of Zambia and Namibia (PDF) (PhD thesis). Ghent University. hdl: 1854/LU-8553074 . Archived from the original (PDF) on Feb 17, 2022.
- Gunnink, Hilde (2022). A grammar of Fwe (PDF). Berlin: Language Science Press. doi: 10.5281/zenodo.6669944 . ISBN 9783961103881. Archived from the original on July 7, 2022.