The palatal or palato-alveolar clicks are a family of click consonants found, as components of words, only in Africa. The tongue is nearly flat, and is pulled back rather than down as in the postalveolar clicks, making a sharper sound than those consonants. The tongue makes an extremely broad contact across the roof of the mouth, making a determination of their place of articulationdifficult, but Ladefoged & Traill find that the primary place of articulation is the palate, and say that "there is no doubt that should be described as a palatal sound". The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents the place of articulation of these sounds is, a double-barred vertical bar. An older variant, the double-barred esh,, is sometimes seen. This may be combined with a second letter or a diacritic to indicate the manner of articulation, though this is commonly omitted for tenuis clicks. In the orthographies of individual languages, palatal clicks may be written either with digraphs based on the vertical-bar letter of the IPA, or using the Latin alphabet. Nama and most Saan languages use the former. Conventions for the latter include multigraphs based on in Juǀʼhoansi and originally in Naro, the latter since changed to, and on. In the 19thcentury, was sometimes used ; this might be the source of the Doke letter for the voiceless palatal click,, apparently a v over-struck with a vertical bar.
Features
Features of palato-alveolar clicks:
The forward place of articulation is broad, with the tongue flat against the roof of the mouth from the alveolar ridge to the palate. The release is a sharp, plosive sound.
has a series of laminal postalveolar-to-palatal clicks with a noisy, fricated release which derive historically from more prototypical palatal clicks. These have been variously described as fricated alveolar clicks and as retroflex clicks. Unlike typical palatal clicks, which have a sharp, abrupt release, these have a slow, turbulent anterior release that sounds much like a short inhaled ; they also have a domed tongue rather than a flat tongue like a typical palatal click. The release has also been described as lateral. Like the clicks they derive from, they do not have the retracted tongue root and back-vowel constraint typical of alveolar clicks. A provisional transcription for the tenuis click is, though this misleadingly suggests that the clicks are affricates. Another proposal is to resurrect the old ʃ-like letter for palatal clicks,.
