Could a European language include dental clicks?

Question

I’m developing a fictional European language and am considering incorporating a range of phonetic elements that are not typically found in European languages. One feature I’m curious about is the inclusion of a dental click. Given the historical and phonological context of European languages, would it be plausible to have a language with this sound, or would it be too unusual or out of place?

Answer 1

It's unlikely, but possible.

The thing with clicks is…we don't know where they come from. At all. We only see them in one specific part of the world, and we don't know how they ended up there. We don't know of any sound changes that would make clicks appear where there weren't any before.

But we do know that clicks can fairly easily spread from one language to another via contact. Various Bantu languages have acquired them from contact with Khoisan, and it's possible (even likely!) that the Khoisan languages aren't a cohesive family historically, and are just grouped together because clicks have spread between them in this way.

So there's one explanation that seems very plausible to me: this language had contact with Bantu or Khoisan languages for a good while, and picked up clicks from them. Perhaps it was a colonial language where the African dialect became more prestigious and ended up having an impact on the original European variant.

You could also say it developed clicks through the same unknown mechanism that happened in Khoisan, whatever that may be, but then there's the question of why those clicks haven't spread across Europe (where there's been a lot of contact between nearby languages since prehistory).

Finally, a little note: there's no language ever documented that has a dental click in it. If you have one dental click, you usually have at least five. Nobody is quite sure why this is the case, but click consonants tend to come in groups; it's entirely possible to have a language with just one or two nasals, stops, or fricatives, but not just one or two clicks.

If you don't want to add tons of clicks to your consonant inventory, though—it is extremely plausible and realistic to only have one or two clicks, if they're not used as phonemes. We see this in English, where a dental click (usually transcribed "tut" or "tsk") is used to indicate disapproval; in Greek, a dental click indicates "no", sort of like the /'ṇ.ʔṇ/ ("uh-uh") in English.

This is called "paralinguistic" use, and it's common to have sounds used paralinguistically that aren't actual standard phonemes.