ANSWERS: 1
  • The language "Xhosa" is probably the best known in the Western world through the 1980 film "The Gods Must Be Crazy". Clicks occur in three Khoisan language families of southern Africa, where they may be the most numerous consonants. To a lesser extent they are found in several neighboring Bantu languages which borrowed them from Khoisan. The most famous of these are the languages of the Nguni cluster (Zulu, Xhosa, Swazi, Phuthi, Ndebele, and the Zulu-based pidgin Fanagalo); the other Bantu click languages are Sesotho and the Yeyi, Mbukushu, Kwangali, and Gciriku languages along the Okavango River in Angola, Namibia, and Botswana. There are three small languages in East Africa which use clicks: Sandawe and Hadza of Tanzania, as well as Dahalo, an endangered South Cushitic language of Kenya which has clicks in only a few dozen words. It is thought these may remain from an episode of language shift. The only non-African language known to employ clicks as regular speech sounds is Damin, a ritual code used by speakers of Lardil in Australia. One of the clicks in Damin is actually an egressive click, using the tongue to compress the air in the mouth for an outward (egressive) "spurt". The Southern African Khoisan languages only utilize root-initial clicks. Hadza, Sandawe, and several of the Bantu languages also allow syllable-initial clicks within roots, but in no known language does a click close a syllable or end a word. Learn more here ... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/African_language

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