Linguolabials or apicolabials are
consonant
In articulatory phonetics, a consonant is a speech sound that is articulated with complete or partial closure of the vocal tract. Examples are and pronounced with the lips; and pronounced with the front of the tongue; and pronounced wit ...
s
articulated by placing the tongue tip or blade against the upper lip, which is drawn downward to meet the tongue. They represent one extreme of a coronal articulatory continuum which extends from linguolabial to
subapical palatal places of articulation. Cross-linguistically, linguolabial consonants are very rare, but they do not represent a particularly exotic combination of articulatory configurations, unlike
click consonant
Click consonants, or clicks, are speech sounds that occur as consonants in many languages of Southern Africa and in three languages of East Africa. Examples familiar to English-speakers are the '' tut-tut'' (British spelling) or '' tsk! tsk!'' ...
s or
ejectives
In phonetics, ejective consonants are usually voiceless consonants that are pronounced with a glottalic egressive airstream. In the phonology of a particular language, ejectives may contrast with aspirated, voiced and tenuis consonants. Some l ...
. They are found in a cluster of languages in
Vanuatu
Vanuatu ( or ; ), officially the Republic of Vanuatu (french: link=no, République de Vanuatu; bi, Ripablik blong Vanuatu), is an island country located in the South Pacific Ocean. The archipelago, which is of volcanic origin, is east of no ...
, in the Kajoko dialect of
Bijago in Guinea-Bissau, in
Umotína (a recently extinct
Bororoan language
The Borôroan languages of Brazil are Bororo language, Borôro and the extinct Umotína language, Umotína and Otuke language, Otuke. They are sometimes considered to form part of the proposed Macro-Jê languages, Macro-Jê language family, thou ...
of
Brazil
Brazil ( pt, Brasil; ), officially the Federative Republic of Brazil (Portuguese: ), is the largest country in both South America and Latin America. At and with over 217 million people, Brazil is the world's fifth-largest country by area ...
), and as
paralinguistic
Paralanguage, also known as vocalics, is a component of meta-communication that may modify meaning, give nuanced meaning, or convey emotion, by using techniques such as prosody, pitch, volume, intonation, etc. It is sometimes defined as relatin ...
sounds elsewhere. They are also relatively common in
disordered speech, and the diacritic is specifically provided for in the
extensions to the IPA
The Extensions to the International Phonetic Alphabet for Disordered Speech, commonly abbreviated extIPA , are a set of letters and diacritics devised by the International Clinical Phonetics and Linguistics Association to augment the Internatio ...
.
Linguolabial consonants are transcribed in the
International Phonetic Alphabet
The International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) is an alphabetic system of phonetic transcription, phonetic notation based primarily on the Latin script. It was devised by the International Phonetic Association in the late 19th century as a standa ...
by adding the "seagull" diacritic, , to the corresponding
alveolar consonant
Alveolar (; UK also ) consonants are articulated with the tongue against or close to the superior alveolar ridge, which is called that because it contains the alveoli (the sockets) of the upper teeth. Alveolar consonants may be articulated with ...
, or with the
apical diacritic, , on the corresponding
bilabial consonant
In phonetics, a bilabial consonant is a labial consonant articulated with both lips.
Frequency
Bilabial consonants are very common across languages. Only around 0.7% of the world's languages lack bilabial consonants altogether, including Tlingi ...
.
[Pullum & Ladusaw, '' Phonetic Symbol Guide'', 1996:256. They note that the apical diacritic was added to the IPA after the linguolabial diacritic, and would have made the latter unnecessary.]
Description
Linguolabials are produced by constricting the airflow between the tongue and the upper lip. They are attested in a number of
manners of articulation
In articulatory phonetics, the manner of articulation is the configuration and interaction of the articulators (speech organs such as the tongue, lips, and palate) when making a speech sound. One parameter of manner is ''stricture,'' that is, h ...
including stops, nasals, and fricatives, and can be produced with the tip of the tongue (apical), blade of the tongue (laminal), or the bottom of the tongue (sublaminal). Acoustically they are more similar to alveolars than bilabials. Linguolabials can be distinguished from bilabials and alveolars acoustically by formant transitions and nasal resonances.
List of consonants
Sound shifts
In Vanuatu, some of the
Santo–Malekula languages have shifted historically from labial to dental consonants via an intermediate linguolabial stage, which remains in other Santo and Malekula languages. In
Nese, for example, labials have become linguolabial before nonrounded vowels; in
Tolomako, this has gone further, so that (
POc *bebe >) ''p̈ep̈e'' 'butterfly' ( in Tangoa) later became in Tolomako; likewise, (POc *tama >) ''tam̈a'' 'father' (Tangoa ) became .
See also
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Place of articulation
*
List of phonetics topics
Notes
References
*
*
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{{DEFAULTSORT:Linguolabial Consonant
Place of articulation
Linguolabial consonants