In the U.S., we say mwah for the kissing noise. In parts of South America, it’s chuik. And for linguists, of course, it’s a bilabial lingual ingressive click. This is part of a complete episode.
Transcript of “Writing a Kiss”
You’re listening to A Way with Words, the show about language and how we use it.
I’m Grant Barrett.
And I’m Martha Barnette.
Let’s talk about kissing.
Okay.
In English, if you want to render the sound of a noisy kiss, you usually write something like moi, right?
Yeah, sure.
M-W-A-H.
Or M-U-A-H for some people.
Yes, something like that.
That’s what I would write.
Yeah, in parts of South America, you would write C-H-U-I-K.
Chwik.
Chwik.
Oh, nice.
Nice, right?
And there are different spellings for this kind of thing all over the world.
But if you ever need a sophisticated term for the sound of a kiss, you can always use the one that linguists use, which is bilabial lingual ingressive click.
Nice, right?
Nice. Bilabial linguist. Say it again, please.
Hey, baby, give me a bilabial lingual ingressive click.
Perfect. Perfect.
And there actually is a linguistic reason to have a term for this because in parts of southern Africa, there is that sound, that sort of kissing sound in certain languages.
Very interesting.
We don’t have that as part of our sound inventory in English, though.
We do not.
We do not.
Not quite that way, anyway.
We do not.
But I’m adding that to my vocabulary, bilabial lingual ingressive click.
We want to talk about all kinds of language this hour.
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