Taa (!Xóõ)

Taa (also written !Xóõ) holds the world record for the largest documented phoneme inventory of any living language — Anthony Traill's monumental 1985 phonology and 1994 dictionary describe roughly 159 phonemes, including pulmonic and ejective consonants and five fully developed click types: dental (ǀ), alveolar (ǃ), lateral (ǁ), palatal (ǂ) and the cross-linguistically rare bilabial click (ʘ). Each click can combine with multiple "accompaniments" (voicing, aspiration, nasalisation, glottalisation, uvularisation, ejection), multiplying the inventory into the hundreds depending on how contour clicks are analysed. Spoken by perhaps 2,500 people in scattered villages along the Botswana–Namibia border in the southwestern Kalahari, Taa is a member of the small Tuu family (formerly classified as Southern Khoisan, a grouping now widely abandoned).