phonetics Phonetics is a branch of linguistics that studies how humans produce and perceive sounds, or in the case of sign languages, the equivalent aspects of sign. Linguists who specialize in studying the physical properties of speech are phoneticians. ...

, labiodentals 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 w ...

s articulated with the lower lip and the upper

teeth A tooth ( : teeth) is a hard, calcified structure found in the jaws (or mouths) of many vertebrates and used to break down food. Some animals, particularly carnivores and omnivores, also use teeth to help with capturing or wounding prey, ...

Labiodental consonants in the IPA

The labiodental consonants identified by the

International Phonetic Alphabet The International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) is an alphabetic system of phonetic notation based primarily on the Latin script. It was devised by the International Phonetic Association in the late 19th century as a standardized representation ...

are: The IPA chart shades out ''labiodental lateral consonants''. This is sometimes read as indicating that such sounds are not possible. In fact, the fricatives and often have lateral airflow, but no language makes a distinction for centrality, and the allophony is not noticeable. The IPA symbol refers to a sound occurring in Swedish, officially described as similar to the velar fricative but one dialectal variant is a rounded, velarized labiodental, less ambiguously rendered as . The labiodental click is an allophonic variant of the (bi)labial click.

Occurrence

The only common labiodental sounds to occur phonemically are the fricatives and the approximant. The labiodental flap occurs phonemically in over a dozen languages, but it is restricted geographically to central and southeastern Africa (Olson & Hajek 2003). With most other manners of articulation, the norm are

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 Tli ...

s (which together with labiodentals, form the class of

labial consonant Labial consonants are consonants in which one or both lips are the active articulator. The two common labial articulations are bilabials, articulated using both lips, and labiodentals, articulated with the lower lip against the upper teeth, b ...

s). is quite common, but in all or nearly all languages in which it occurs, it occurs only as an

allophone In phonology, an allophone (; from the Greek , , 'other' and , , 'voice, sound') is a set of multiple possible spoken soundsor ''phones''or signs used to pronounce a single phoneme in a particular language. For example, in English, (as in '' ...

of before labiodental consonants such as and . It has been reported to occur phonemically in a dialect of Teke, but similar claims in the past have proven spurious. The XiNkuna dialect of Tsonga features a pair of affricates as phonemes. In some other languages, such as Xhosa, affricates may occur as allophones of the fricatives. These differ from the

German German(s) may refer to: * Germany (of or related to) **Germania (historical use) * Germans, citizens of Germany, people of German ancestry, or native speakers of the German language ** For citizens of Germany, see also German nationality law **Ge ...

voiceless labiodental affricate The voiceless labiodental affricate ( in IPA) is a rare affricate consonant that is initiated as a labiodental stop and released as a voiceless labiodental fricative . The XiNkuna dialect of Tsonga has this affricate, as in "hippopotamuses" a ...

, which commences with a bilabial p. All these affricates are rare sounds. The stops are not confirmed to exist as separate

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 in any language. They are sometimes written as ''ȹ ȸ'' ''(qp'' and ''db'' ligatures). They may also be found in children's speech or as speech impediments.

consonants

Dentolabial consonants are the articulatory opposite of labiodentals: They are pronounced by contacting lower teeth against the upper lip. They are rare cross-linguistically, likely due to the prevalence of dental malocclusions (especially retrognathism) that make them difficult to produce, though one

of Swedish has been described as a velarized dentolabial fricative, and the voiceless dentolabial fricative is apparently used in some of the southwestern dialects of Greenlandic (Vebæk 2006). The diacritic for dentolabial in the extensions of the IPA for disordered speech is a superscript bridge, , by analogy with the subscript bridge used for labiodentals: . Complex consonants such as affricates, prenasalized stops and the like are also possible.

References

* *Olson, Kenneth S. & John Hajek. 2003. Crosslinguistic insights on the labial flap. ''Linguistic Typology'' 7(2). 157–186. *Vebæk, Mâliâraq. 2006. The southernmost People of Greenland-Dialects and Memories (Vol. 337): Qavaat-Oqalunneri Eqqaamassaallu. Museum Tusculanum Press.

Labiodental consonants in the IPA

Occurrence

consonants

See also

References

Further reading