Social Clicks: Sounds Associated with African 
Languages Are Common in English
Linguists find that tongue clicks play a larger role 
in English than previously thought
By Anne Pycha
Scientific American
February 3, 2012
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=just-a-click-away

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.

Speakers, it turns out, use clicks for a previously
overlooked purpose: as a form of verbal punctuation in
between thoughts or phrases. Melissa Wright of
Birmingham City University in England recently analyzed
click sounds in six large sets of recorded English
conversations. She found that speakers used clicks
frequently to signal that they were ending one stretch
of conversation and shifting to a new one. For example,
a speaker might say, "Yeah, that was a great game,"
produce a click, then say, "The reason I'm calling is to
invite you to dinner tomorrow."

This pattern, which occurred for both British and
American speakers, suggests that clicks have a meaning
similar to saying "anyway" or "so." That is, clicks
provide us with a phonetic resource to organize
conversations and communicate our intentions to
listeners. This finding had previously eluded linguists,
whose research often focuses on words and sentences in
isolation. Wright was able to uncover the new pattern
because she analyzed clicks in the context of complete
conversations, suggesting that this method could be
important for making new discoveries about the nature of
language.

These results, published in the Journal of the
International Phonetic Association, could shake up
current thinking about the origin of language. On the
basis of linguistic and genetic data, some researchers
have claimed that the ancestral population of humans
lived in Africa and spoke a click language. As languages
farther and farther away from Africa are examined, they
argue, clicks become less and less integral, suggesting
they are relics that have been lost as humans migrated
away from their homeland and diversified their speech.
Wright's research, however, shows that clicks can be
important even in a modern language very far from
Africa.

This discovery opens up the possibility that clicks are
not relics at all but are flexible linguistic tools that
can help meet the communication needs of any human
population.

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