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, except for the h sound, which is pronounced without any stricture in the vocal tract. Examples are and pronou ...

s articulated with the lower lip and the upper teeth, such as and . In English, labiodentalized /s/, /z/ and /r/ are characteristic of some individuals; these may be written .

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

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 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. 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: thus . Complex consonants such as affricates, prenasalized stops and the like are also possible. These are rare cross-linguistically, likely due to the prevalence of dental malocclusions (especially retrognathism) that make them difficult to produce, though the voiceless dentolabial fricative is used in some of the southwestern dialects of Greenlandic.

Origins

The commonality of labiodentals (especially f and v) has been argued to be linked to the Agricultural Revolution.

References

Sources

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