Shubi is a
Bantu language spoken by the
Shubi people in north-western
Tanzania
Tanzania (; ), officially the United Republic of Tanzania ( sw, Jamhuri ya Muungano wa Tanzania), is a country in East Africa within the African Great Lakes region. It borders Uganda to the north; Kenya to the northeast; Comoro Islands ...
. It may use
labiodental
In phonetics, labiodentals are consonants articulated with the lower lip and the upper teeth.
Labiodental consonants in the IPA
The labiodental consonants identified by the International Phonetic Alphabet are:
The IPA chart shades out ''labio ...
plosives , (sometimes written ȹ, ȸ) as
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, rather than as
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 '' ...
s of .
Peter Ladefoged
Peter Nielsen Ladefoged ( , ; 17 September 1925 – 24 January 2006) was a British linguist and phonetician.
He was Professor of Phonetics at University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), where he taught from 1962 to 1991. His book '' A Cours ...
wrote:
:We have heard labiodental stops made by a Shubi speaker whose teeth were sufficiently close together to allow him to make an airtight labiodental closure. For this speaker this sound was clearly in contrast with a bilabial stop; but we suspect that the majority of Shubi speakers make the contrast one of bilabial stop versus labial-labiodental affricate (i.e. bilabial stop closure followed by a labiodental fricative), rather than bilabial versus labiodental stop.
LINGUIST List 5.219: Labiodental nasals
/ref>
References
External links
Rwanda-Rundi languages
{{Bantu-lang-stub