Tenuis lateral click (velar)
kǁ kʖ
ᵏǁ ᵏʖ
ǁ ʖ
IPA number	180
Encoding
Entity(decimal)	ǁ​ʖ
Unicode(hex)	U+01C1 U+0296
X-SAMPA	|\|\
Braille
Image

Thelateral clicks are a family ofclick consonants found only inAfrican languages. The clicking sound used byequestrians to urge on theirhorses is a lateral click, although it is not a speech sound in that context. Lateral clicks are found throughout southern Africa, for example inZulu, and in some languages in Tanzania and Namibia. The place of articulation is not known to be contrastive in any language, and typically varies fromalveolar topalatal.

The symbol in theInternational Phonetic Alphabet that represents a generic lateral click is ⟨ǁ⟩, a doublevertical bar. Prior to 1989, ⟨ʖ⟩^[1] was the IPA letter for the lateral clicks, and this is still preferred by some phoneticians, as the vertical bar may be confounded with prosody marks, two dental clicks, and in some fonts, with a double lowercaseL. Either letter may be combined with a second letter to indicate themanner of articulation, though this is commonly omitted fortenuis clicks with a velar rear articulation.

In official IPA transcription, the click letter is combined with a ⟨kɡŋqɢɴ⟩ via a tie bar, though ⟨k⟩ is frequently omitted. Many authors instead use a superscript ⟨kɡŋqɢɴ⟩ without the tie bar, again often neglecting the ⟨k⟩. Either letter, whether baseline or superscript, is usually placed before the click letter, but may come after when the release of the velar or uvular occlusion is audible. A third convention is the click letter with diacritics for voicelessness, voicing and nasalization; this does not distinguish velar from uvular lateral clicks. Common lateral clicks in these three transcriptions are:

The last is what is heard in the sound sample above, as non-native speakers tend to glottalize clicks to avoid nasalizing them.

In the orthographies of individual languages, the letters and digraphs for lateral clicks may be based on either the vertical bar symbol of the IPA, ⟨ǁ⟩, or on the Latin⟨x⟩ of Bantu convention.Nama and mostBushman languages use the former;Naro,Sandawe, andZulu use the latter.

The specific articulation of lateral clicks may vary from language to language, from dental to palatal, apical or laminal, though no contrast between such articulations has been confirmed apart from theretroflex clicks, which may have lateral release.

Features of lateral clicks:

• The basic articulation may be voiced, nasal, aspirated, glottalized, etc.
• The release of the forwardplace of articulation is a noisy,affricate-like sound in southern Africa, but abrupt in Hadza and Sandawe in East Africa.
• Clicks may beoral ornasal, which means that the airflow is either restricted to the mouth, or passes through the nose as well.
• They arelateral consonants, which means they are produced by releasing the airstream at the side of the tongue, rather than in the middle. Some speakers pronounce them on one side of the mouth, some on both.
• Theairstream mechanism islingual ingressive (also known as velaric ingressive), which means a pocket of air trapped between two closures is rarefied by a "sucking" action of the tongue, rather than being moved by theglottis or thelungs/diaphragm. The release of the forward closure produces the "click" sound. Voiced and nasal clicks have a simultaneouspulmonic egressive airstream.

RegardingKhoekhoe, Tindall notes that European learners almost invariably pronounce these sounds as simple laterals, by placing the tongue against the side teeth, and that this articulation is "harsh and foreign to the native ear". The Nama instead cover the whole of the palate with the tongue, and produce the sound "as far back in the palate as possible".^[2]

English does not have a lateral click (or any click consonant, for that matter) as a phoneme, but an unreleased^[3] lateral click does occur as aninterjection, usually writtentchick! ortchek! (and oftenreduplicatedtchick-tchick!), used to urge a horse to move. A form of click can also be heard by some English speakers whenscoffing, but this is generally adental click rather than a lateral click.

• Fricated palatal click (described as having a lateral release)
• Retroflex click (has a fricated lateral release)

• Pullum, Geoffrey K.; Ladusaw, William A. (1996).Phonetic Symbol Guide. University of Chicago Press. p. 178.

• List of languages with[ǁ] onPHOIBLE

• Alveolar consonants
• Click consonants
• Lateral consonants

• Articles with short description
• Short description matches Wikidata
• Pages with plain IPA
• Articles using infobox templates with no data rows
• Articles containing Hadza-language text
• Articles containing Xhosa-language text
• Articles containing ǃXóõ-language text
• Articles containing Zulu-language text