[hinkley]

So yeah that helps me articulate, but I’m still fuzzy on if there’s a different muscle back there that Arabic uses, or if the answer is “yes, it’s a variant on the same thing”?

I’m a bit of a parrot and so sounds I can’t reproduce draw me in like a moth to a flame. The click sound in some African languages and the very guttural singsong of Vietnamese/Thai are my only nemeses... so far.

[yebyen]

Ayn is a voiced pharyngeal fricative, ghayn is a voiced velar fricative. My intuitive answer was wrong, I thought the difference was one is fricative and the other is not... at any rate, those are points of articulation, not muscles.

An articulation point is simply supposed to be the place where you put your tongue. In this case it's so far back in your throat, I'm not sure you actually can put your tongue there.

But the muscles are in your tongue, the articulation points are just places in your mouth. Like the palate, for palatal consonants, or lips for labial, in some more familiar examples.

[snovv_crash]

isiZulu / isiXhosa have not one, but three distinct click sounds. I suspect the Khoisan languages have even more.

[animal531]

Not that many more, they mostly only use 4, with 5 in some localised dialects.