A labialized velar or labiovelar is a

velar consonant Velars are consonants articulated with the back part of the tongue (the dorsum) against the soft palate, the back part of the roof of the mouth (known also as the velum). Since the velar region of the roof of the mouth is relatively extensive an ...

that is

labialized Labialization is a secondary articulatory feature of sounds in some languages. Labialized sounds involve the lips while the remainder of the oral cavity produces another sound. The term is normally restricted to consonants. When vowels involve ...

, with a -like

secondary articulation In phonetics, secondary articulation occurs when the articulation of a consonant is equivalent to the combined articulations of two or three simpler consonants, at least one of which is an approximant. The secondary articulation of such co-articul ...

. Common examples are , which are pronounced like a , with rounded lips, such as the

labialized voiceless velar plosive Labialization is a secondary articulatory feature of sounds in some languages. Labialized sounds involve the lips while the remainder of the oral cavity produces another sound. The term is normally restricted to consonants. When vowels involve ...

and labialized voiced velar plosive . Such sounds occur across Africa and the Americas, in the Caucasus, etc.

Labialized velar approximants

The most common labiovelar consonant is the voiced approximant . It is normally a labialized velar, as is its vocalic cousin . (Labialization is called

rounding Rounding means replacing a number with an approximate value that has a shorter, simpler, or more explicit representation. For example, replacing $ with $, the fraction 312/937 with 1/3, or the expression with . Rounding is often done to ob ...

in vowels, and a velar place is called

back The human back, also called the dorsum, is the large posterior area of the human body, rising from the top of the buttocks to the back of the neck. It is the surface of the body opposite from the chest and the abdomen. The vertebral column runs ...

.) and its voiceless equivalent are the only labialized velars with dedicated IPA symbols: * ¹ - In

dialect The term dialect (from Latin , , from the Ancient Greek word , 'discourse', from , 'through' and , 'I speak') can refer to either of two distinctly different types of Linguistics, linguistic phenomena: One usage refers to a variety (linguisti ...

s that distinguish between ''which'' and ''witch''. The voiceless approximant is traditionally called a "voiceless labial–velar fricative", but true

doubly articulated Doubly articulated consonants are consonants with two simultaneous primary places of articulation of the same manner (both plosive, or both nasal, etc.). They are a subset of co-articulated consonants. They are to be distinguished from co-articul ...

fricatives are not known to be used in any language, as they are quite difficult to pronounce and even more difficult to distinguish.

Historical development

Labialized velars frequently derive from a plain velar followed by a rounded (labialized) vowel, such as or . In turn, they may sometimes develop into simple

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 ...

s. An example of this is the development of Proto-Indo-European *kʷ, *gʷ before *a or *o into

Greek Greek may refer to: Greece Anything of, from, or related to Greece, a country in Southern Europe: *Greeks, an ethnic group. *Greek language, a branch of the Indo-European language family. **Proto-Greek language, the assumed last common ancestor ...

/p, b/, producing cognates as different as English ''come'' and ''basis''. The full sequence is demonstrated by the Satsuma dialect of Japanese: in northern Satsuma, Standard Japanese 'eat!' has contracted to ; in southern Satsuma, it has proceeded further to . A notable development is the initial *kʷ in

Proto-Indo-European Proto-Indo-European (PIE) is the reconstructed common ancestor of the Indo-European language family. Its proposed features have been derived by linguistic reconstruction from documented Indo-European languages. No direct record of Proto-Indo-E ...

interrogative word An interrogative word or question word is a function word used to ask a question, such as ''what, which'', ''when'', ''where'', ''who, whom, whose'', ''why'', ''whether'' and ''how''. They are sometimes called wh-words, because in English most o ...

s. In English, it developed into '' wh'' or ''h'' (''how''), pronounced /w/ in most dialects and /h/, respectively, via

Grimm's law Grimm's law (also known as the First Germanic Sound Shift) is a set of sound laws describing the Proto-Indo-European (PIE) stop consonants as they developed in Proto-Germanic in the 1st millennium BC. First systematically put forward by Jacob Gr ...

followed by ''wh''-cluster reductions. By contrast, in

Latin Latin (, or , ) is a classical language belonging to the Italic branch of the Indo-European languages. Latin was originally a dialect spoken in the lower Tiber area (then known as Latium) around present-day Rome, but through the power of the ...

and its descendants, the

Romance languages The Romance languages, sometimes referred to as Latin languages or Neo-Latin languages, are the various modern languages that evolved from Vulgar Latin. They are the only extant subgroup of the Italic languages in the Indo-European language fam ...

, that developed into '' qu'' (later Spanish ''cu'' (''cuando'') and ''c'' (''como'')), pronounced variously as /kw/ or /k/. See etymology of English interrogative words for details. The English

phonemic spelling A phonemic orthography is an orthography (system for writing a language) in which the graphemes (written symbols) correspond to the phonemes (significant spoken sounds) of the language. Natural languages rarely have perfectly phonemic orthographi ...

'' kw'' for ''qu'' (as in '' kwik'') echoes its origin.

Labialized velar approximants

Historical development

See also