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, 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 Muscle, muscular organ (anatomy), organ in the mouth of a typical tetrapod. It manipulates food for chewing and swallowing as part of the digestive system, digestive process, and is the primary organ of taste. The tongue's upper s ...

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, , and , are labiodental. The voiceless bilabial fricative, voiced bilabial fricative, and the bilabial approximant do not exist as the primary realizations of any sounds in English, but they occur in many languages. For example, the Spanish consonant written ''b'' or ''v'' is pronounced, between vowels, as a voiced bilabial approximant. Lip rounding, or labialization, is a common

approximant Approximants are speech sounds that involve the articulators approaching each other but not narrowly enough nor with enough articulatory precision to create turbulent airflow. Therefore, approximants fall between fricatives, which do prod ...

-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, 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 A phoneme () is any set of similar Phone (phonetics), speech sounds that are perceptually regarded by the speakers of a language as a single basic sound—a smallest possible Phonetics, phonetic unit—that helps distinguish one word fr ...

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, Eyak (both Na-Dené), Wichita ( Caddoan), and the Iroquoian languages except

Cherokee The Cherokee (; , or ) people are one of the Indigenous peoples of the Southeastern Woodlands of the United States. Prior to the 18th century, they were concentrated in their homelands, in towns along river valleys of what is now southwestern ...

. 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.

References

* * McDorman, Richard E. (1999). ''Labial Instability in Sound Change: Explanations for the Loss of /p/''. Chicago: Organizational Knowledge Press. . {{IPA navigation Place of articulation *

Lack of labials

See also

References