Xhosa Tongue Twisters

You may well know that over 2000 languages are spoken in Africa. The guttural sounding Arabic and Tamazight (Berber) dialects in the north, give way to softer sounds as you travel further south. And when you reach the very southern parts of Africa, a strange clicking noise enters into the vocabulary. When I visited Cape Town for the first time, it was the conversation interspersed with clicks that excited me most on arrival. I ignored my luggage making its way round the conveyer belt a few times, just to listen to the customs guys chat about the weather in Xhosa, it could have been Zulu. Either way, both have clicks and make up two of South Africa's 11 official languages. (That's right, eleven official languages).

I had previously been under the impression that "clicking" was exclusive to San Bushman languages. I didn't expect to hear it under the glare of city lights. If you want to hear a sample, check out this video of a young man in Port Elizabeth, patiently explaining the various Xhosa clicks. Or this young man telling a tongue-twisting Xhosa tale at the Robben Island Museum. I also found a delightful Zulu song, with plenty of clicks to go around. I'm Dutch, so it's easy for me to roll my R's as well as any Latina, and my G's sound nice and throat-cleary. But, heaven help me, I absolutely fail at any and all variations of the click.