Xhosa-Zulu Cliking Sounds

Well … according to the voices of my head i was supposed to write about science and tech here … But i discovered something cool in the intervals of discussions about science and tech these day. It happened that there was a BRICS meeting at my institute about the collaborations in HPC and AI, so we had people from here (Brazil), Russia, China, India, South Africa, UAE, Iran, and others that i didn’t interacted. The coolest cultural stuff i learned was from the South African delegation, more specifically from mr. Happy (his name is actually “Happy”) he mentioned the “Clicking languages” of South Africa that uses clicking sounds, mainly used by the Zulu and Xhosa people.

It happens that there exists languages in Africa, the Khoisan family of languages, that uses a system of clicking sounds as phonetic sounds, from which the Zulu and Xhosa people absorbed some influence in it’s own languages, resulting on the clicking sounds they have today for the “c”, “x” and “q” letters, as well as the “p” letter for the Zulu. These sounds make for very distinctive sounding words.

According to mr. Happy, the Xhosa and Zulu people in South Africa you like you more if you can make these sounds while talking hehe But then you’ll need something different for the other 9 languages there since there are 11!