Social Clicks: Sounds Associated with African Languages Are Common in English

February 3, 2012, 8:00 am by Scientific American: Mind and Brain

Some Africans click, but English speakers don’t. That’s been the conventional wisdom about click sounds, which serve as regular consonants in Zulu and Xhosa and a few other African languages but which were presumed to just be used in English for encouraging a horse, imitating a kiss, or expressing emotions such as disapproval or amazement. But researchers have recently found that clicks are far more prevalent in the world’s lingua franca than had been thought. [More]

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