Why don't more languages have clicking consonants?

I have to admit I think clicking languages like Zulu and Xhosa sound cool. :)

After looking up the topic on sites such as WALS, I noticed that only southern African languages in the Khoisan and Bantu families have these kind of sounds (with the exception of Dahalo in Kenya). Why do you think it turned out this way? "Th" sounds are uncommon, yet they are spread throughout the world, as are "pharyngeals".

This is more a discussion than a WI, since chances are the POD would go so far back that history would be unrecognizable. (Except if Shaka Zulu goes north instead of south or something). . .
 
To grossly over simplify, the only languages that kept clicks were the Khoisan ones. When Bantu peoples moved into the area, they adopted the clicks into their own languages. The Khoisan are genetically as well linguistically distinct from the rest of humanity. Presumably, when Hsap split into two populations about the time of the Toba near extinction, one group developed (kept?) clicks and the other didnt (or lost them?).

To get clicks more widely spread, you likely need to get Khoisan influenced languages spreading - which means an agricultural, seafaring people there thousands of years ago. The infamous 'phoenicians in south africa' idea could do the trick, especially if they trade around the Indian Ocean and their clickified version of Semitic becomes the base for a lingua franca...
 
Southern African languages are not (quite) the only languages to have click consonants.

There is one other language that does so: Damin, spoken on some islands off northern Australia.

Intriguingly, Damin is not a full language. It was a ceremonial language, with a much reduced stock of words, and it has some features which are suggestive of an invented language. None of the other neighbouring languages had click consonants, at least not that I know of.

Regardless of exactly how Damin acquired click consonants, it shows that it is possible to independently invent them. And even English does have some click sounds which have meaning ("tsk-tsk", for instance). So click consonants could have been used more widely. They just weren't, possibly for random reasons.
 
So i read this years ago, and am basing this purely off memory. I may hunt down the article tomorrow. According to whatever, languages get less diverse the farther from Africa they get. Sub-saharan languages make use of 35 or so sounds, the widest variety. Latin descended languages and English use 27 or so (we have lost the clicks, whispers, hissing, etc. Gained th and v). Native American languages use twenty or less. So, there is a rough correlation between complexity and distance from Africa. I hope this info helps.

And Ps, i would love if we had some clicking in English. I've heard its on of the only linguistic things that can only be seamlessly incorporated by native speakers.
 
So i read this years ago, and am basing this purely off memory. I may hunt down the article tomorrow. According to whatever, languages get less diverse the farther from Africa they get. Sub-saharan languages make use of 35 or so sounds, the widest variety. Latin descended languages and English use 27 or so (we have lost the clicks, whispers, hissing, etc. Gained th and v). Native American languages use twenty or less. So, there is a rough correlation between complexity and distance from Africa. I hope this info helps.

And Ps, i would love if we had some clicking in English. I've heard its on of the only linguistic things that can only be seamlessly incorporated by native speakers.

The Caucasus and its languages with inventories of 40+ consonants would like to have a word with you.

EDIT: Indian languages are nothing to scoff at in the consonant department either. And if we count vowels as well, even English flirts with 40 phonemes...
 
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RE: the out-of-Africa-losing-consonants theory, there is a major problem in that languages gain and lose complexity all the time according to, as best we can tell, random trends. Aside from the examples of complex sound systems pointed out already, how should we control for these random trends? It's possible that complexity in sound systems rises and falls over time and we have very little data for the vast vast majority of the human languages that have ever been spoken.

I have come across another theory that may be relevant: as a general rule, languages spoken by a small group of people tend more towards complex, inflected grammars and unique sounds, while larger languages tend more towards isolating grammars with simpler sounds. This is hypothesized to happen because people living in small groups already know each other very well and have a lot of shared background information so many of the referents in conversation can be easily inferred from inflections and context (think of how often you can be really vague and still be understood by your friends and family). Additionally, as smaller languages aren't generally learned often by outsiders, they have few pressures to become more grammatically transparent or pronounceable for the benefit of adult learners. Larger languages have generally gone through a period where they have become the language of hegemony in an extended area, and assimilated large hordes of people speaking other dialects or completely different languages and so have had some of the rough edges filed down, so to speak. Speakers of larger languages are more likely to run into strangers with strange accents and little shared background so more information must be spelled out, typically by relying on word order and auxiliary words for grammatical meaning. A paper analyzing grammatical features vs. population size of the speakers can be found here:
http://www.helsinki.fi/~ksinnema/Complexity_PopSize_web.pdf

It's also worth mentioning that creoles, whose whole reason for existence is to form a means of communication between people of very different backgrounds, tend to lack features that are obnoxious for outsiders to learn like complex systems of inflection, tones, and irregular forms.

As far as the OP goes, the fact that clicks aren't widespread may indicate that they are a characteristic of the Khoisan peoples' isolation and small number of speakers per language. The reconstructions of click sound evolution tend to point to them being originally generated from complex sequences of normal consonants, which means they may be a linguistic device, like inflection, that simplifies communication for people who have a common background but complicates it for people who don't. While some Bantu languages have gained clicks, some Khoisan languages have also lost them due to Bantu influence. This suggests to me that clicks are a feature that wouldn't travel well even as part of a larger, hegemonic language.
 
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