Lateral clicks

The lateral clicks are a family of click consonants found only in African languages. The clicking sound used by equestrians to urge on their horses is a lateral click, although it is not a speech sound in that context. Lateral clicks are found throughout southern Africa and in two languages in Tanzania. The place of articulation is not known to be contrastive in any language, and typically varies from alveolar to palatal.

The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents a generic lateral click is ⟨ǁ⟩, a double pipe. Prior to 1989, ⟨ʖ⟩ was the IPA letter for the lateral clicks, and this is still preferred by some phoneticians, as the pipe may be confounded with prosody marks and, in some fonts, with a double el. Either letter may be combined with a second letter to indicate the manner of articulation, though this is commonly omitted for tenuis clicks, and increasingly a diacritic is used instead. Common lateral clicks are:

The last is what is heard in the sound sample above, as non-native speakers tend to glottalize clicks to avoid nasalizing them.