CLICKS, peculiar sounds of unknown origin, found in many languages. The German term Schnalze and the Afrikaans klukken are both attempts to give a descriptive name, but the English word Click is as onomatopoeic as any. The outstanding examples of click-speech are the Hottentot languages (Nama, !kora, Griqua, etc.) with four or five different clicks and those of the Bushmen of South Africa ( !kung, kham, !ai, etc.), with as many as nine different clicks. From contiguity with the Hottentots and Bushmen several Bantu stocks have acquired clicks, which are alien to Bantu speech-systems. Such stocks are the Zulus and Kaffirs while the Damaras, (originally Bantu), have dropped their language entirely and speak only Hottentot. In the interior, Afrikaans (Cape Dutch), has even acquired clicks.
It seems fairly well established now, that clicks are by no means confined to these South African tongues. There are cases of their presence in the Melanesian languages of the Eastern Pacific, the Q of Codrington and Paterson representing a click sound. Clicks never appear very far north of the equator and a definite "click-zone" can be found girdling the earth with, and south of, the equator. A recent study of the Quichua language of the Incas of Peru shows the existence of click-sounds, later rubbed down to simple gutturals, in the ancient tongue. The Aztec or Nahuatl tongue also had clicks and in the surviving Aztec spoken by Mexicans in the hills of the interior, the tl, final and initial, sounds exactly like a Hottentot dental click.
In the Nama speech (q.v.) (Standard Hottentot), there are four clicks, represented thus: The sounds must be heard ; no description can do more than convey a general idea of their nature. The dental click, for example, is pronounced by pressing the flattened tip of the tongue against the front teeth at the gums and quickly withdrawing it. Early attempts to define and describe these sounds will be found in the works mentioned below.
See H. Tindall, A Grammar of the Namaqua-Hottentot Language (Cape Town, n.d.) ; J. L. Dane, Zulu-Kafir Dictionary (Cape Town, 18S 7) ; Meinhof, Lehrbuch der Namasprache (1909) ; Leonhard, Aus Namaland and Kalahari (19o5) ; N. Whymant, The Zone of Clicks (Tokyo, 1923) . See also BUSHMAN LANGUAGES, HOTTENTOTS and NAMA and SANDAWE: Language. (A. N. J. W.)