Individual languages have had various orthographies, usually based on either the Lepsius alphabet or on the Latin alphabet. They may change over time or between countries. Latin letters, such as ⟨c⟩ ⟨x⟩ ⟨q⟩ ⟨ç⟩, have case forms; the pipe letters ⟨ǀ⟩ ⟨ǁ⟩ ⟨ǃ⟩ ⟨ǂ⟩ do not.[a]
By the early 19th century, the otherwise unneeded letters ⟨c⟩ ⟨x⟩ ⟨q⟩ were used as the basis for writing clicks in Zulu by British and German missions.[b] However, for general linguistic transcription this was confusing, as each of these letters had other uses. There were various ad hoc attempts to create dedicated letters—often iconic symbols—for click consonants, with the most successful being those of the Standard Alphabet by Lepsius, which were based on a single symbol (pipe, double pipe, pipe-acute, pipe-sub-dot) and from which the modern Khoekhoe letters ⟨ǀ⟩ ⟨ǁ⟩ ⟨ǃ⟩ ⟨ǂ⟩ descend.
File:Doke ʗhũ clicks.pngThe 1925 Doke orthography for Script error: No such module "IPA". (ǃXũ). Note that "alveolar" (2nd column) and "palato-alveolar" (3rd column) correspond to modern palatalScript error: No such module "IPA". and alveolarScript error: No such module "IPA"., as can be confirmed with the rendition of the language ǃXũ as Template:Angbr IPA. The letters in the first, third and fifth columns had earlier been used for Zulu. The voiced dental click has the letter Template:Angbr IPA that would later be used by the IPA for a voiced velar fricative. Though not clear from this image, the descenders on the nasal clicks that bend to the right bear rings, while those that bend to the left are tails as in IPA Script error: No such module "IPA". and Script error: No such module "IPA".. That is, the nasal click letters are, respectively, n with a ring on the right leg, ŋ with a ring on the left leg, n with a ring on the left leg, ɲ with a ring on the right leg, and n with rings on both legs, or, in the order of the main table, File:Doke bilabial nasal click.svgFile:Doke dental nasal click.svgFile:Doke alveolar nasal click.svgFile:Doke lateral nasal click.svgFile:Doke palatal nasal click.svgFile:Doke retroflex nasal click.svg.
During the First World War, Daniel Jones adopted the equivalent letters Script error: No such module "IPA". in response to a 1914 call to fill this gap in the IPA, and these were published in 1921; they were formally accepted by the IPA in 1928 (see §§ 1921 chart and 1928 revisions).[8]
Clement Doke expanded on Jones' letters in 1923. Based on an empirically informed conception of the nature of click consonants, he analyzed voiced and nasal clicks as separate consonants, much as the voiced plosives Script error: No such module "IPA". and nasals Script error: No such module "IPA". are considered separate consonants from the voiceless plosives Script error: No such module "IPA"., and so he created letters for voiced and nasal clicks. (Like other researchers, Doke did not use the palatal click letter from the IPA. Jones had called it "velar", and people took it as having that value rather than its intended one.) Doke was the first to report retroflex clicks, and created letters for them as well.
File:Beach Khoekhoe click letters.pngThe clicks of Khoekhoe in the Beach alphabet of 1938. The columns are (left to right) dental, alveolar, lateral and palatal. In modern orthography, the rows are Ʞg Ʞn Ʞkh Ʞ Ʞh, where Ʞ is used to represent any click letter (any column).
Douglas Beach would publish a somewhat similar system in his phonetic description of Khoekhoe. Because Khoekhoe had no voiced clicks, he only created new letters for the four nasal clicks. Like Doke, he didn't use Jones' "velar" click letter, but created one of his own, Template:Angbr IPA, based on the Lepsius letter Template:Angbr IPA modified to better fit the design of the IPA.
Besides the difference in letter shape (variations on a pipe for Lepsius, modifications of Latin letters for Jones), there was a conceptual difference between them and Doke or Beach: Lepsius used one letter as the base for all click consonants of the same place of articulation (called the 'influx'), and added a second letter or diacritic for the manner of articulation (called the 'efflux'), treating them as two distinct sounds (the click proper and its accompaniment),[r] whereas Doke used a separate letter for each tenuis, voiced, and nasal click, treating each as a distinct consonant, following the example of the Latin alphabet, where the voiced and nasal occlusives also treated as distinct consonants (p b m, t d n, c j ñ, k g ŋ).
The Khoekhoe word ǁnau (𝼎au), illustrating the curled tail Beach used to indicate nasal clicks.
Beach wrote on Khoekhoe and so had no need for letters for the voiced clicks; he created letters for nasal clicks by adding a curl to the bottom of the tenuis-click letters: Template:Angbr IPA.
The only other scripts to have letters for clicks are N'ko in Mali and Luo script in Botswana, which include them for paralexical use,[p] and the experimental Ditema tsa Dinoko script, which uses them lexically.
Transcribing voiced and nasal clicks, and the velar–uvular distinction
Doke had run "admirable" experiments establishing the nature of click consonants as unitary sounds. Nonetheless, Bleek in his highly influential work on Bushman languages rejected Doke's orthography on theoretical grounds, arguing that each of Doke's letters stood for two sounds, "a combination of the implosive sound with the sound made by the expulsion of the breath" (that is, influx plus efflux), and that it was impossible to write the clicks themselves in Doke's orthography, as "we cannot call [the implosive sounds] either unvoiced, voiced, or nasal."[19] Bleek therefore used digraphs based on the Lepsius letters, as Lepsius himself had done for the same reason. However, linguists have since come down on the side of Doke and take the two places of articulation to be inherent in the nature of clicks, because both are required to create a click: the 'influx' cannot exist without the 'efflux', so a symbol for an influx has only theoretical meaning just as a symbol like Template:Angbr IPA for 'alveolar consonant' does not indicate any actual consonant. Regardless, separate letters like Doke's and Beach's were never provided by the IPA, and today linguists continue to resort to digraphs or diacritics in a way that is not used for non-click consonants. (For example, no-one transcribes an alveolar nasal stopScript error: No such module "IPA". as either Template:Angbr IPA or Template:Angbr IPA, analogous to the way one writes a dental nasal click as Template:Angbr IPA or Template:Angbr IPA, or in the older tradition as Template:Angbr IPA or Template:Angbr IPA.)
Summarized below are the common means of representing voicing, nasalization and dorsal place of articulation, from Bleek's digraphs reflecting an analysis as co-articulated consonants, to those same letters written as superscripts to function as diacritics, reflecting an analysis as unitary consonants, to the combining diacritics for voicing and nasalization. Because the last option does not indicate the posterior place of articulation, it does not directly distinguish velar from uvular clicks. However, the IPA guttural diacritic could be used for the more guttural uvular series. The letter Template:Angbr IPA is used here as a wildcard for any click letter.
In the older literature, voicing is commonly marked by a wavy diacritic under the click letter, thus: Script error: No such module "IPA"..[citation needed]
Historical orthographies
Written languages with clicks generally use an alphabet either based on the Lepsius alphabet, with multigraphs based on the pipe letters for clicks, or on the Zulu alphabet, with multigraphs based on c q x for clicks. In the latter case, there have been several conventions for the palatal clicks. Some languages have had more than one orthography over the years. For example, Khoekhoe has had at least the following, using dental clicks as an example:
Khoekhoe orthographies (illustrated with dental clicks)
Modern
ǀguis
ǀa
ǀham
ǀnu
Beach (1938)
ʇuis
ʇʔa
ʇham
𝼍u
Tindall (1858)
cguis
ca
cham
cnu
Historical roman orthographies have been based on the following sets of letters:
There are two principal conventions for writing the manners of articulation (the 'effluxes'), which are used with both the Lepsius and Zulu orthographies. One uses g for voicing and x for affricate clicks; the other uses d for voicing and g for affricate clicks. Both use n for nasal clicks, but these letters may come either before or after the base letter. For simplicity, these will be illustrated across various orthographies using the lateral clicks only.
Conventions for click manners (illustrated on lateral clicks)
The following systems are presented in the same order: bilabial ('ɋ'), dental ('c'), lateral ('x'), alveolar ('q'), palatal ('v') and retroflex ('‼'), with gaps for missing letters.
^The original Lepsius pipe letters actually did have case forms. For example, Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'Module:Footnotes/anchor_id_list' not found. wrote Amaxhosa and Xhosa as Amaııósa and 𝖨𝖨ósa.
^ abcFile:Norwegian click letters.pngZulu click letters of the Norwegian mission The Norwegian mission to the Zulu used ⟨ϟ⟩ (a z-like zig-zag) for c (perhaps related to the use of both z and c for dental affricates), a double ⟨ϟ⟩ (a ξ-like qoppa zigzag) for x (perhaps not coincidentally, Greek ξ is transcribed x), and the same letter with an umlaut for q.
^The Lepsius letter is a short vertical pipe, with neither ascender nor descender—that is, of the same height as the letter ⟨n⟩, similar to ⟨ı⟩—nor serifs. In Krönlein's work, it has a short ascender, giving it the height of a capital or the lowercase letter ⟨t⟩; moreover in Krönlein, the four pipe letters are always inclined, like the letters in italic and oblique type. Bleek 1875 and Lloyd 1911 also used capital-height letters, so they would harmonize with titles and other all-capital text, but kept them upright except in italic text.
^The double-barred pipe was proposed by the Rhenish Mission Conference in 1856 and quickly replaced Lepsius's pipe with acute accent.[15] Sundevall (1855/56) displays the letter as Template:Angbr IPA.
^Tindall's full paradigm is: c ch ck cg ckh cn q qh qk qg qkh qn x xh xk xg xkh xn v vh vk vg vkh vn
^In the Anthropos journal turned p is distinguishable from d by the difference in the top serifs, the shape of the bowl and the bottom terminal in the italic font used.
^The letters for the 'palatal' (i.e. alveolar) and lateral clicks have descenders, analogous to ⟨q⟩ and unlike the glottal stop letter, while those for the dental and lateral clicks have ascenders.
^Identified as palatal lateral. UPSID distinguishes affricated from abrupt clicks by adding a superscript fricative letter. The dedicated extIPA letter Template:Angbr IPA was not yet available.
^The letter Template:Angbr IPA (Script error: No such module "IPA".) is 'implicit' in the IPA but is not included in the summary IPA chart. It is uncommon, and ad hocTemplate:Angbr IPA is often used in the literature.
^On a typewriter, ≠ can be composed by overlaying a slash over an equal sign.
^ abAs N'ko click letters are not supported by Unicode as of 2025, here they are substituted with Arabic diacritical dots, combined above the Arabic tatweel joiner (U+0640). In actual N'ko, they are each a connecting horizontal stroke with similar dots above.
^Linguasphere found the Khoisanist/IPA letters to be impractical for sorting and with their database, and so substituted them with p', c', q', l', t'. These occur with the usual accompaniments, for sequences such as L'xegwi, Nc'hu, C'qwi, and Q'xung. Lingvarium did something similar for Cyrillic.
Essential to the [clicks] is the peculiarity of stopping in part, and even drawing back the breath, which appears to be most easily expressed by a simple bar 𝗅. If we connect with this our common marks for the cerebral [i.e. retroflex: the sub-dot] or the palatal [i.e. the acute accent], a peculiar notation is wanted only for the lateral, which is the strongest sound. We propose to express it by two bars 𝗅𝗅. As the gutturals [i.e. posterior articulations] evidently do not unite with the clicks into one sound, but form a compound sound, we may make them simply to follow, as with the diphthongs. File:Lepsius click letters.png
— Lepsius (1863:80–81)
^reported from a few words, not used in modern publication
^a typewriter-friendly variant of the Juǀʼhoan convention of ç, which had initially been used for Naro as well.
^Page Module:Citation/CS1/styles.css has no content.Lepsius, C. R. (1855). Das allgemeine linguistische Alphabet: Grundsätze der Übertragung fremder Schriftsysteme und bisher noch ungeschriebener Sprachen in europäische Buchstaben. Berlin: Verlag von Wilhelm Hertz.
^Page Module:Citation/CS1/styles.css has no content.Lepsius, C. R. (1863). Standard Alphabet for Reducing Unwritten Languages and Foreign Graphic Systems to a Uniform Orthography in European Letters (2nd ed.). London/Berlin.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link)
^Page Module:Citation/CS1/styles.css has no content.Bleek, Wilhelm. A Comparative Grammar of South African Languages. Vol. (1862: Part I, 1869: Part II). London: Trübner & Co.
^Page Module:Citation/CS1/styles.css has no content.Bleek, Wilhelm H. I.; Lloyd, L. C. (1911). Specimens of Bushman Folklore. London: George Allen & Company.
^Katechismus (Catechism of the ǃKora language), undated manuscript revision of 1815 edition, which did not have a coherent transcription for clicks.
^ abPage Module:Citation/CS1/styles.css has no content.William Binnington Boyce (1834). A grammar of the Kafir language. London.
.jpg){kind=link}
.png){kind=link}
.svg){kind=link}
.svg){kind=link}
