Which Language Uses the Most Sounds?

With five distinct kinds of clicks, multiple tones and strident vowels — vocalized with a quick choking sound — the Taa language, spoken by a few thousand people in Botswana and Namibia, is believed by most linguists to have the largest sound inventory of any tongue in the world.

The exact count differs among scholars. Studies commonly cite more than 100 consonants, and some say there are as many as 164 consonants and 44 vowels. English, by comparison, has about 45 sounds at its disposal, total.

Taa, also known as !Xoon, is part of the Khoisan language group, spoken in the Kalahari Desert and hardly anywhere else. All Khoisan languages use click consonants, which were featured in the hit 1980 film “The Gods Must Be Crazy.”

The five click types in !Xoon are the dental click (written with the symbol ǀ), which is something like the tut-tut sound English speakers make; the alveolar click (written ǃ), made with the tip of the tongue against the alveolar ridge); the palatal click (ǂ), made with a flat tongue broadly placed on the palate; the lateral click (ǁ), like the sound equestrians use to communicate with horses; and the rarest click of all in the Khoisan languages, the bilabial click (ʘ), made with both lips.

Combining these basic click types with other sounds yields about 43 distinct click consonants.

“Once clicks, which are difficult to produce in articulatory terms, are integrated in the sound system, and speakers are accustomed to utter them frequently, they are ideal speech sounds with very distinctive acoustic properties,” said Christfried Naumann, a linguistics researcher at Humboldt University in Berlin.

Languages that use clicks can pack a lot of information into brief words. “Many concepts might be expressed in a single syllable in Taa that would take three to four syllables in English,” said Bonny Sands, a linguist who teaches at Northern Arizona University.

But they have a drawback, too, at least for students trying to share secrets in the classroom: It is difficult to whisper them.

Speakers of click languages must be “masters of breath,” said Amanda Miller, a researcher in the linguistics department at Ohio State University. “The most challenging skill that children have to achieve to speak a click language is to produce syllables that commence with a click consonant by breathing air in, and then quickly shift to breathing out to produce the following vowel, without leaving an intervening pause.”

Fittingly for the language with the most sounds, !Xoon is rich with words that describe noises. The sound of a sharp object falling point-first into sand is ǂqùhm ǁhûũ The sound of a rotten egg when shaken is !húlu ts’êẽ. The sound of grass being ripped by a grazing animal: gǀkx’àp.

Why did the use of clicks arise? In Khoisan languages, word lengths are limited to one or two syllables, so one theory holds that a large number of consonants and vowels became necessary to express an expansive vocabulary.

Everybody can make these sounds, though, not just southern Africans. So given how efficient (and fun) they can make speech, the bigger mystery may be why more languages don’t use clicks. Tsk tsk.