Sandawe language: Encyclopedia II - Sandawe language - Sounds

Sandawe language - Sounds

Sandawe language - Vowels

Sandawe has five vowel qualities:

All five vowel qualities may be found as short oral, long oral and long nasal vowels. There are therefore fifteen vowel phonemes. In word-final position, devoiced u and i vowels occur frequently.

Sandawe language - Consonants

[not written yet]

(source: Wright et al. 1995)

The clicks in Sandawe are not particularly loud, when compared to more famous click languages in southern Africa. The lateral click [kǁ] can be confused with the ejective lateral affricate [tɬ’]. With the postalveolar clicks, the tongue often slaps the bottom of the mouth, and this slap may be louder than the actual release of the click. Wright et al. transcribe this slapped click with the ad hoc symbol [kǃ¡], although this is not the normal Extended IPA meaning of that symbol.

Only three of the five click effluxes occur between vowels, and all are nasalized. (Nasal clicks are the easiest to pronounce; in Dahalo and Damin, for example, all clicks are nasal.) The glottalized click efflux is something like creaky voice; it is not an ejective. In initial position, the glottis is closed during the entire occlusion of the click, but not opened until after the burst of the [k], which is after the click release [ǃ]. In medial position, the glottis is closed after the velar closure [ŋ] and before the forward closure, but opened before the click release. Such clicks are not always nasalized all the way through; in some tokens they are simply prenasalized glottalized clicks, [ŋkǃˀ], bearing in mind that the superscript [ˀ] implies coarticulation (that is, that it is pronounced together with the [k], not after, as explained above).

Adapted from the Wikipedia article "Sounds", under the G.N U Free Docmentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki