Labiodental consonant

Template:Short description Template:IPA notice In phonetics, labiodentals are consonants articulated with the lower lip and the upper teeth, such as and .

Labiodental consonants in the IPA

The labiodental consonants identified by the International Phonetic Alphabet are:

IPA	Description	Example
		Language	Orthography	IPA	Meaning
	voiceless labiodental nasal	Angami			allophone of before
	voiced labiodental nasal	Kukuya (disputed)			'eyes'
	voiceless labiodental plosive	Greek	σάπφειρος		'sapphire'
	voiced labiodental plosive	Sika
	voiceless labiodental affricate	Tsonga	timpfuvu		'hippos'
	voiced labiodental affricate	Tsonga	shilebvu		'chin'
	voiceless labiodental fricative	English	fan
	voiced labiodental fricative	English	van
	voiced labiodental approximant	Dutch	wang		'cheek'
	voiced labiodental flap	Mono	vwa		'send'
	labiodental ejective affricate	Tsetsaut	apfʼo		'boil'
	labiodental ejective fricative	Yapese	fʼaang		'type of eel'
	labiodental click release (many different consonants)	Nǁng	ʘoe		'meat'

Consonants without a dedicated symbol in the IPA may be written as the corresponding bilabial consonant with the bridge diacritic for dentalization.

In English, labiodentalized /s/, /z/ and /r/ are characteristic of some individuals; these may be written .

The IPA chart shades out labiodental lateral consonants. This is despite the fact that the airflow in the fricatives and is often at the side of the mouth. No language makes a distinction in the lateral or central location of the airflow, and perhaps because of this a lateral consonant is defined as one in which the airflow passes over the side of the tongue, and so does not apply to labial consonants.

The IPA symbol ɧ was devised for a consonant of Swedish that has various pronunciations, in one dialect a rounded velarized labiodental less ambiguously transcribed 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 consonants (which together with labiodentals, form the class of labial consonants).

is quite common, but in 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 Kukuya, 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 ⟨pf⟩, which commences with a bilabial p. All these affricates are rare sounds.

The stops are not confirmed to exist as separate phonemes 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.

Origins

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

See also

• Place of articulation
• List of phonetics topics

Sources

• Ladefoged, Peter; Maddieson, Ian (1996). The Sounds of the World's Languages. Oxford: Blackwell. ISBN 0-631-19815-6.
• Olson, Kenneth S.; Hajek, John (2003). "Crosslinguistic insights on the labial flap". Linguistic Typology. 7 (2): 157–186. doi:10.1515/lity.2003.014.
• Paulian, Christiane (1975). Le kukuya, langue teke du Congo: phonologie, classes nominales. Paris: SELAF. ISBN 978-2-85297-008-3.

Further reading

• Blasi, Damián E.; Moran, Steven; Moisik, Scott R.; Widmer, Paul; Dediu, Dan; Bickel, Balthasar (2019). "Human sound systems are shaped by post-Neolithic changes in bite configuration". Science. 363 (6432) eaav3218. doi:10.1126/science.aav3218. PMID 30872490.
• Hockett, Charles (1989). "Distinguished Lecture: F". American Anthropologist. 87 (2): 263–281. doi:10.1525/aa.1985.87.2.02a00020. JSTOR 678561.
• Moran, Steven; Bickel, Balthasar (15 March 2019). "Softer, processed foods changed the way ancient humans spoke". The Conversation.