So let’s talk about what's commonplace. Some things just happen all the time, and
we take them for granted. But what's normal for us might be unusual
for other people, and maybe we do something really rare, compared to
the people over in the next town. And it's the same for language sounds. Some
sounds just do things... a little differently than others. I'm Moti Lieberman, and this
is the Ling Space.
So when you look at all the possible sounds that people can make with their mouths, some of
them are really common for language, like [u] or [s], and then some just never show up.
Like (raspberry). That may be easy to do, but it’s not a phoneme
in any attested language. In between, though, there are also sounds
that do show up, but only rarely, and those often depend on unusual ways of getting the
sound out there.
We’re going to take you on a tour of these, but first, let's just take a moment to think about
how weird spoken language is. We take in air from the environment, and then
push it out of our bodies while we think about what we want to tell other people.
And then, without even doing it consciously, our fleshy bits from our lungs to our lips
start flapping and squeezing and moving around, chopping the air stream into syllables that
the human ear perceives as language. It's incredible!
So there’s a few different ways we can make sounds happen with our faces.
The most common is by pushing air out of the lungs, which we call pulmonic egressives:
pulmonic because of the lungs, and egressive because the air is going out.
Our vowels like [a] or[ʌ] or [y] come out of our vocal tract like this, free and easy.
Most consonants are egressive too, but they differ from vowels in that the airflow gets
more or less blocked.
For a fricative, like [v] or [ð], your articulators get close together but not shut all the way,
so the air going through gets noisy. And for plosives, like [b], and [k], your mouth
closes completely for a bit, before the air bursts from inside you, free once more.
These pulmonic egressives make up the sounds that the International Phonetic Association
put together on the consonant chart like, and you can see there’s a lot of them.
And this is the chart that you usually find, and that we’ve talked about before. But
if you think this is all there is, have we got a surprise for you.
Bam! Extra chart. Okay, so this is a different kind of setup fromthe main IPA
chart - manner of articulation, or how you pronounce
stuff, is listed across the top, and place of articulation, or where you pronounce stuff,
is listed in the columns next to the symbols. Now, let’s unpack this, starting
over here, with ejectives.
An ejective is when you eject a sound from your mouth with some extra venom and pop.
You get that extra pressure from closing not only the usual articulators in your mouth
- like, moving your tongue up to your soft palate to make a [k] - but also further down
in your throat, where you shut your vocal folds tight.
Then you just raise your larynx up - your whole voice box goes upwards!
That makes the air inside your mouth, between your tongue and your larynx, more pressurized
than the air outside. And so when you lower your tongue, and let
go of the closure, basic physics just wants these two now-connected air pockets to match
their pressures as quickly as possible. So the air goes out with a loud pop, as the pressure
inside your mouth and in the world equalizes. You put it all together, and it gives you
something like this: [k’].
Ejectives may not be super common, but they do show up in about 20% of the world’s languages. And in about 3/4 of those, they’re phonemic
- so swapping the ejective version for the regular un-pressurized pulmonic version
causes a change in meaning. Let’s take an example from Tzeltal, a language
from the Chiapas region of Mexico.
Tzeltal has the same three voiceless stops as English, so [p], [t], and [k], but it also
has ejective versions of each of those.
And we can pretty easily find minimal pairs for this:
so like, /kúʃ/, or “he woke up,” is different from /k’ùʃ/, or “painful.”
So what kinds of things can you ejectivize? It makes sense that you can do it with stops,
because a complete closure of air flow through your speech tube is exactly
the kind of situation where it’s easy to get the pressures to mismatch.
But you can also do it with fricatives, where the airflow through the mouth gets so constrained
that it gets kind of hissy, or with affricates, which are like a stop and a fricative that just fell
in love at first sight. Even if those sounds are leakier, they’re
still constrained enough that your larynx driving up at the back of your mouth can cause
that poppy imbalance.
So let’s go back to Tzeltal, which actually has ejective affricates, along with its stops.
For Tzeltal, the word for pimple is /tʃín/, with a regular [tʃ], but the word for small
is /tʃ'ín/. In some languages, you can even get lateral
ejectives that go out of the side of the tongue, instead of through the front.
Tlingit, a Native American language spoken in southeast Alaska and western Canada, has
this sound, like in its word for tongue. It’s got ejectives on both sides!
So if you look at the different ejectives we’ve talked about so far, you’ll notice
they’re all voiceless and they’re all oral. And that’s because you can’t have
the other kinds. But why not? Well, it all comes back to how ejectives are
made. You need a complete closure between your voice box and wherever your tongue
or lips have stopped up the airflow, because you need that high pressure system going on.
But when you make a nasal sound, by definition there's air going out through your nose.
And unlike with a fricative, your nose is a clear, easy path to ethereal freedom. So
there’s a mismatch there. And it’s the same for voiced ejectives.
Remember, voicing is made by having your vocal folds vibrate rapidly.
And how do you make them vibrate? By blowing air through them while they try to stay shut.
But for an ejective, the vocal folds actually have to be shut. They can’t be vibrating
as air goes through. They have to be straight-up closed. So a voiced ejective would require
your vocal folds do be doing two different things at the same time. And unless you’re
a literal five-headed dragon, that’d be pretty unlikely. So you can come up with some pretty
interesting ways to push the air out of your lungs.
But if you think about it, you can also suck air in in a noisy way.
These are called ingressive sounds, because the airflow goes inwards.
Many people have this kind of noise as a not-quite-linguistic sound, like (tsk tsk) or (gasp).
Some languages do have that ingressive mechanism as part of their meaningful bits, though.
Like the word for “yeah” in Swedish is an ingressive “ja”. There’s even some
dialects of English that pull air in to say yes, like in Scotland!
And you know plosives, like [p] and [b] or [t] and [d]? Well, you could make those towards
the inside too, and then they become implosives. Not to be confused with explosives, which
we suggest you should keep out of your mouth. Anyway, you can kind of think of implosives
as the opposite of ejectives. You do the same steps: you seal the vocal
folds and make a complete closure somewhere in the mouth.
But this time, you lower your larynx, instead of raising it. This means that now, the pressure
in your mouth is less than the outside world. And when you open up the front of your mouth
mouth again, the air does its equalizing thing, but this time, inside your head. It rushes
into you, giving implosives like [ɓ] or [ɠ] their characteristic gulping sound.
Implosives are a little bit less common than ejectives, showing up in about 13% of the
world’s languages. You mostly find them in sub-Saharan Africa, and in southern Asia.
But they can be just as phonemic as ejectives. Take, for example, this pair of words from
Sindhi, a language spoken in India and Pakistan. In Sindhi, the word for “door” is [d̪əru],
but the word for “fear” is [ɗəru]. The only difference between fear and a door is
just gulping.
Like ejectives, implosives can’t have nasal versions. But unlike ejectives, they’re
limited to just stops. Tales of implosive fricatives and affricates exist, but they’re
extremely rare, and possibly just illusory. And this makes sense: to get a fricative, you can’t
have a complete closure. For an ejective, that’s not so bad: you
can still get a good amount of pressure inside your mouth behind that hissy fricative. But
for an implosive, you’d need to change the pressure of the entire world outside…
which isn't really likely.
But what about voicing? You might have noticed that implosives are the opposite of ejectives
ejectives here: implosives are all voiced, instead of voiceless. You can have voiceless implosives,
though - they’re just really rare. But you get them in languages like Serer or Igbo.
Implosives are sort of like ultra-voiced sounds - they usually come from voiced stops that
got more aggressively voiced over time. So getting them on voiceless sounds is really peculiar.
There’s one more class of ingressive consonants, and they’re my favorite type of sounds:
clicks. These sounds are super cool and super uncommon: it’s almost just one language family
in southern Africa that has them. You make them by pushing the body of your
tongue to the soft palate, and also making another closure further front in the mouth, like
your lips or teeth. Then, you slide your tongue body further back along the soft palate.
By making the space inside your mouth bigger, the pressure in it goes down and creates suction.
Then you release the closure at the front, and pop! You can make clicks at a lot of the
same places of articulation as other consonant sounds. Like the bilabial click,
[ʘ]. Or the dental, [|]. But you can’t make them at the soft palate or further back,
like at the uvula, because that’d require some kind of weird anti-space that defies regular
physics. Not a good choice.
And different clicks can contrast with each other, too.
Khoekhoe, one of the national languages of Namibia, has 20 different click phonemes,
depending where you pronounce them and how you release them - so like, plain, nasalized, with
a puff of air, lots of choices. But to give you a taste, the plain dental
click in [ kǀoa], or “put into,” contrasts with the plain alveolar click, like in [kǃoas],
or “hollow.”
So the variety of language sounds humans make is more diverse than most of us realize. We
gulp air in and pop it out and click our tongues with meaning. We’ve used almost every way
we could come up with to broadcast our ideas to our neighbours. How’s that for commonplace.
So, we’ve reached the end of The Ling Space for this week. If you kept the explosives
out of your mouth, you learned that there are more types of consonants in human language
than just the ones made by pushing air out of your lungs; that ejectives involve pressurizing
our vocal tracts and then popping out some consonants; and that ingressive sounds are
made by sucking air in, and include clicks and implosives.
The Ling Space is produced by me, Moti Lieberman. It’s directed by Adèle-Elise Prévost,
and it’s written by both of us. Our editor is Georges Coulombe, our production assistant
is Stephan Hurtubise, our music is by Shane Turner, and our graphics team is atelierMUSE.
We’re down in the comments below, or you can bring the discussion back over to our
website, where we’ll have some extra material on this topic. Check us out on Tumblr, Twitter,
and Facebook, and if you want to keep expanding your own personal Ling Space, please subscribe.
And we’ll see you next Wednesday. ||ám !āo