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Labial consonant

 

 
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Labial consonant
 
 
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Labials are consonants articulated either with both lips (bilabial articulation) or with the lower lip and the upper teeth (labiodental articulation). English is a bilabial nasal
Nasal consonant

A nasal consonant is produced with a lowered soft palate in the mouth, allowing air to escape freely through the nose. The oral cavity still acts as a resonance chamber for the sound, but the air does not escape through the mouth as it is blocked by the tongue....
 sonorant
Sonorant

In phonetics and phonology, a sonorant is a speech sound that is produced without turbulent airflow in the vocal tract. Essentially this means a sound that's "squeezed out" or "spat out" is not a sonorant....
, and are bilabial stops
Stop consonant

A stop, plosive, or occlusive is a consonant sound produced by stopping the airflow in the vocal tract. The terms plosive and stop are usually used interchangeably, but they are not perfect synonyms....
 (plosives), and are labiodental fricatives
Fricative consonant

Fricatives are consonants produced by forcing air through a narrow channel made by placing two Place of articulation close together. These may be the lower lip against the upper teeth, in the case of ; the back of the tongue against the soft palate, in the case of German language , the final consonant of Bach; or the side of the tongue ag...
.

Bilabial fricatives and the bilabial approximant do not exist in standard English, but do occur in many languages.






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Labials are consonants articulated either with both lips (bilabial articulation) or with the lower lip and the upper teeth (labiodental articulation). English is a bilabial nasal
Nasal consonant

A nasal consonant is produced with a lowered soft palate in the mouth, allowing air to escape freely through the nose. The oral cavity still acts as a resonance chamber for the sound, but the air does not escape through the mouth as it is blocked by the tongue....
 sonorant
Sonorant

In phonetics and phonology, a sonorant is a speech sound that is produced without turbulent airflow in the vocal tract. Essentially this means a sound that's "squeezed out" or "spat out" is not a sonorant....
, and are bilabial stops
Stop consonant

A stop, plosive, or occlusive is a consonant sound produced by stopping the airflow in the vocal tract. The terms plosive and stop are usually used interchangeably, but they are not perfect synonyms....
 (plosives), and are labiodental fricatives
Fricative consonant

Fricatives are consonants produced by forcing air through a narrow channel made by placing two Place of articulation close together. These may be the lower lip against the upper teeth, in the case of ; the back of the tongue against the soft palate, in the case of German language , the final consonant of Bach; or the side of the tongue ag...
.

Bilabial fricatives and the bilabial approximant do not exist in standard English, but do occur in many languages. For example, the Spanish consonant spelt b or v is pronounced as a voiced bilabial approximant between vowels.

Lip rounding, or labialisation
Labialisation

Labialisation is a Secondary articulation feature of sounds in some languages. Labialized sounds involve the lips while the remainder of the mouth produces another sound....
 can also accompany other articulations. English is a labialised velar approximant
Labial-velar consonant

Labial-velar consonants are Doubly articulated consonant at the Soft palate and the lips. They are sometimes called "labiovelar consonants", a term which can also refer to labialization velars, such as and the approximant ....
.

Labial consonants are divided into two subplaces of articulation:

  • bilabial consonant
    Bilabial consonant

    In phonetics, a bilabial consonant is a consonant articulated with both lips. The bilabial consonants identified by the International Phonetic Alphabet are:...
    s
  • labiodental consonant
    Labiodental consonant

    In phonetics, labiodentals are consonants Place of articulation with the lower lip and the upper teeth. The labiodental consonants identified by the International Phonetic Alphabet are:...
    s


Very few languages, however, make a distinction on purely this basis. (One example is Ewe
Ewe language

Ewe is a Niger-Congo language spoken in Ghana, Togo and Benin by over three million people. Ewe is part of a cluster of related languages commonly called Gbe languages, spoken in southeastern Ghana and southern Togo....
, with both kinds of fricatives.) For by far the most languages in the world, labial by itself is a sufficient phonemic
Phoneme

In human language, a phoneme is the smallest posited linguistically distinctive unit of sound. Phonemes carry no semantic content themselves. In theoretical terms, phonemes are not the physical segment s themselves, but cognitive abstractions or categorizations of them....
 specification. Whether the sounds will actually be bilabial or labiodental depends on the language, but the most common pattern is that exhibited in English: bilabial stops and nasals, labiodental fricatives. Neither purely labial approximant is as common as the labial-velar approximant .

See also

  • List of phonetics topics
    List of phonetics topics

    A * Acoustic phonetics* Active articulator* Affricate* Airstream mechanism* Alfred C. Gimson* Allophone* Alveolar approximant* Alveolar consonant...