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.