[lg policy] Which Language Uses the Most Sounds?

[Harold Schiffman]

Which Language Uses the Most Sounds? Click 5 Times for the Answer

What in the World <http://www.nytimes.com/column/what-in-the-world>

By BRYANT ROUSSEAU NOV. 25, 2016
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<https://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/25/world/what-in-the-world/click-languages-taa-xoon-xoo-botswana.html?action=click&contentCollection=World&module=RelatedCoverage&region=EndOfArticle&pgtype=article#story-continues-1>
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Speakers of Khoisan languages, like the San people in Namibia, use click
consonants, packing a lot of information into brief words. Credit Eric
Lafforgue/Gamma-Rapho, via Getty Images

With five distinct kinds of clicks, multiple tones and strident vowels —
vocalized with a quick choking sound — the Taa language, spoken by a few
thousand people in Botswana
<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/international/countriesandterritories/botswana/index.html?inline=nyt-geo>
and Namibia
<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/international/countriesandterritories/namibia/index.html?inline=nyt-geo>,
is believed by most linguists to have the largest sound inventory of any
tongue in the world.
Audio
Sound of the Strident Vowel in !Xoon 0:01
Play

This sentence in !Xoon, translated as “I eat porridge,” includes a strident
vowel at the end.

The exact count differs among scholars. Studies commonly cite more than 100
consonants, and some say there are as many as 164 consonants and 44 vowels.
English, by comparison, has about 45 sounds at its disposal, total.

ANGOLA

ZAMBIA

ZIMBABWE

BOTSWANA

Windhoek

NAMIBIA

Gaborone

SWAZILAND

LESOTHO

Atlantic

Ocean

SOUTH AFRICA

Indian

Ocean

Khoisan language group

By The New York Times

Taa, also known as !Xoon, is part of the Khoisan language group, spoken in
the Kalahari Desert and hardly anywhere else. All Khoisan languages use
click consonants, which were featured in the hit 1980 film “The Gods Must
Be Crazy
<http://www.nytimes.com/1984/10/28/arts/film-view-is-the-gods-must-be-crazy-only-a-comedy.html>
.”
Audio
Sound of the 5 Basic Click Types in !Xoon 0:14
Play

Hear the five basic click types: dental, alveolar, palatal, lateral and
bilabial.

The five click types in !Xoon are the dental click (written with the symbol
ǀ), which is something like the tut-tut sound English speakers make; the
alveolar click (written ǃ), made with the tip of the tongue against
the alveolar
ridge <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alveolar_ridge>); the palatal click
(ǂ), made with a flat tongue broadly placed on the palate; the lateral
click (ǁ), like the sound equestrians use to communicate with horses; and
the rarest click of all in the Khoisan languages, the bilabial click (ʘ),
made with both lips.

Combining these basic click types with other sounds yields about 43
distinct click consonants.

“Once clicks, which are difficult to produce in articulatory terms, are
integrated in the sound system, and speakers are accustomed to utter them
frequently, they are ideal speech sounds with very distinctive acoustic
properties,” said Christfried Naumann, a linguistics researcher at Humboldt
University in Berlin.
Audio
!Xoon Vocabulary: ǂqùhm ǁhûũ 0:03
Play

ǂqùhm ǁhûũ means the sound of a sharp object falling point-first into
sand.

Languages that use clicks can pack a lot of information into brief words.
“Many concepts might be expressed in a single syllable in Taa that would
take three to four syllables in English,” said Bonny Sands, a linguist who
teaches at Northern Arizona University.

But they have a drawback, too, at least for students trying to share
secrets in the classroom: It is difficult to whisper them.
Hear the sounds of !Xoon, also spelled !Xóõ, from the University of
California, Los Angeles Phonetics Lab Archive.

Speakers of click languages must be “masters of breath,” said Amanda
Miller, a researcher in the linguistics department at Ohio State
University. “The most challenging skill that children have to achieve to
speak a click language is to produce syllables that commence with a click
consonant by breathing air in, and then quickly shift to breathing out to
produce the following vowel, without leaving an intervening pause.”
Audio
!Xoon Vocabulary: !húlu ts’êẽ 0:01
Play

!húlu ts’êẽ means the sound a rotten egg makes when shaken.

Fittingly for the language with the most sounds, !Xoon is rich with words
that describe noises. The sound of a sharp object falling point-first into
sand is ǂqùhm ǁhûũ The sound of a rotten egg when shaken is !húlu
ts’êẽ. The sound of grass being ripped by a grazing animal: gǀkx’àp.
Audio
!Xoon Vocabulary: gǀkx’àp 0:01
Play

gǀkx’àp means the sound of grass being torn off by a grazing animal.

Why did the use of clicks arise? In Khoisan languages, word lengths are
limited to one or two syllables, so one theory holds that a large number of
consonants and vowels became necessary to express an expansive vocabulary.

Everybody can make these sounds, though, not just southern Africans. So
given how efficient (and fun) they can make speech, the bigger mystery may
be why more languages don’t use clicks. Tsk tsk.


>From the NYTiumnes, 1/1/17


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