Labial consonants are consonants in which one or both
lip
The lips are the visible body part at the mouth of many animals, including humans. Lips are soft, movable, and serve as the opening for food intake and in the articulation of sound and speech. Human lips are a tactile sensory organ, and can be ...
s are the
active articulator
The field of articulatory phonetics is a subfield of phonetics that studies articulation and ways that humans produce speech. Articulatory phoneticians explain how humans produce speech sounds via the interaction of different physiological struct ...
. The two common labial articulations are
bilabials, articulated using both lips, and
labiodentals, articulated with the lower lip against the upper teeth, both of which are present in
English. A third labial articulation is
dentolabials, articulated with the upper lip against the lower teeth (the reverse of labiodental), normally only found in pathological speech. Generally precluded are
linguolabials, in which the tip of the
tongue
The tongue is a muscular organ in the mouth of a typical tetrapod. It manipulates food for mastication and swallowing as part of the digestive process, and is the primary organ of taste. The tongue's upper surface (dorsum) is covered by taste ...
contacts the posterior side of the upper lip, making them
coronals, though sometimes, they behave as labial consonants.
The most common distribution between bilabials and labiodentals is the
English one, in which the
nasal and the
stops, , , and , are bilabial and the
fricatives
A fricative is a consonant produced by forcing air through a narrow channel made by placing two articulators close together. These may be the lower lip against the upper teeth, in the case of ; the back of the tongue against the soft palate in t ...
, , and , are labiodental. The
voiceless bilabial fricative,
voiced bilabial fricative, and the
bilabial approximant
The voiced bilabial fricative is a type of consonantal sound, used in some spoken languages. The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents this sound is , and the equivalent X-SAMPA symbol is B. The official symbol is the G ...
do not exist as the primary realizations of any sounds in
English, but they occur in many languages. For example, the
Spanish
Spanish might refer to:
* Items from or related to Spain:
**Spaniards are a nation and ethnic group indigenous to Spain
**Spanish language, spoken in Spain and many Latin American countries
**Spanish cuisine
Other places
* Spanish, Ontario, Can ...
consonant written ''b'' or ''v'' is pronounced, between vowels, as a
voiced bilabial approximant.
Lip rounding, or
labialization, is a common
approximant-like
co-articulatory feature. English is a
voiced labialized velar approximant, which is far more common than the purely
labial approximant �̞ In the
languages of the Caucasus
The Caucasian languages comprise a large and extremely varied array of languages spoken by more than ten million people in and around the Caucasus Mountains, which lie between the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea.
Linguistic comparison allows t ...
, labialized
dorsals like /kʷ/ and /qʷ/ are very common.
Very few languages, however, make a distinction purely between
bilabials and
labiodentals, making "labial" usually a sufficient specification of a language's
phoneme
In phonology and linguistics, a phoneme () is a unit of sound that can distinguish one word from another in a particular language.
For example, in most dialects of English, with the notable exception of the West Midlands and the north-wes ...
s. One exception is
Ewe, which has both kinds of fricatives, but the labiodentals are produced with greater articulatory force.
Lack of labials
While most languages make use of purely labial phonemes, a few generally lack them. Examples are
Tlingit
The Tlingit ( or ; also spelled Tlinkit) are indigenous peoples of the Pacific Northwest Coast of North America. Their language is the Tlingit language (natively , pronounced ), ,
Eyak (both
Na-Dené),
Wichita (
Caddoan), and the
Iroquoian languages except
Cherokee
The Cherokee (; chr, ᎠᏂᏴᏫᏯᎢ, translit=Aniyvwiyaʔi or Anigiduwagi, or chr, ᏣᎳᎩ, links=no, translit=Tsalagi) are one of the indigenous peoples of the Southeastern Woodlands of the United States. Prior to the 18th century, t ...
.
Many of these languages are transcribed with and with
labialized consonants. However, it is not always clear to what extent the lips are involved in such sounds. In the Iroquoian languages, for example, involved little apparent rounding of the lips. See the
Tillamook language for an example of a language with "rounded" consonants and vowels that do not have any actual labialization. All of these languages have seen labials introduced under the influence of English.
See also
*
Labialization
*
Index of phonetics articles
References
*
* McDorman, Richard E. (1999). ''Labial Instability in Sound Change: Explanations for the Loss of /p/''. Chicago: Organizational Knowledge Press. .
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Place of articulation
*