Click languages

Click languages:

see African languagesAfrican languages,
geographic rather than linguistic classification of languages spoken on the African continent. Historically the term refers to the languages of sub-Saharan Africa, which do not belong to a single family, but are divided among several distinct linguistic stocks.
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References in periodicals archive ?

Chapter 11, a very interesting contribution to the book, deals specifically with click languages and what they can or cannot tell us about the origins of language, proving that the use of clicks in paralinguistic utterances are no evidence of their linguistic antiquity.

Rudolph Botha and Chris Knight (eds), The Prehistory of Language

Genetic comparison of two such tribes suggests that the unusual click languages, known as Khoisan languages, could resemble the ancestral tongue of all humankind.

For more than a century, linguists have debated the origins of these click languages, notes Alec Knight of Stanford University.

DNA hints at origin of all language. (Biology: from San Diego, at a meeting of the American Society of Human Genetics)

Other passengers came over, and soon I had an audience of almost a hundred -- a British missionary couple, a Hottentot family, Ovango men, Xhosa and !Kung with their melodious click languages, and a smattering of Dutch and German engineers.