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Bilabial consonant

Consonant articulated with both lips

Summary

Consonant articulated with both lips

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 Tlingit, Chipewyan, Oneida, and Wichita, though all of these have a labial–velar approximant .

Varieties

Some bilabial consonants identified by the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) are:

IPA	Description	Example	Language	Orthography
voiceless bilabial nasal	Hmong	Hmoob		Hmong
voiced bilabial nasal	English	man		man
voiceless bilabial plosive	English	spin		spin
voiced bilabial plosive	English	bed		bed
voiceless bilabial affricate	Kaingang	fy		'seed'
voiced bilabial affricate	Shipibo	boko		'small intestine'
voiceless bilabial fricative	Japanese	富士山 (ja)		Mount Fuji
voiced bilabial fricative	Ewe	ɛʋɛ		Ewe
bilabial approximant	Spanish	lobo		wolf
voiced bilabial flap	Mono	vwa		'send'
voiceless bilabial trill	Pará Arára		'to throw away'
voiced bilabial trill	Nias	simbi		lower jaw
bilabial ejective stop	Adyghe	пӀэ		meat
bilabial ejective fricative	Yuchi	ḟasę
voiceless bilabial implosive	Kaqchikel	b'ojoy		'pot'
voiced bilabial implosive	Jamaican Patois	beat		beat
bilabial clicks (many distinct consonants)	Nǁng	ʘoe		meat

Owere Igbo has a six-way contrast among bilabial stops: .

Other varieties

The extensions to the IPA also define a **** () for smacking the lips together. A lip-smack in the non-percussive sense of the lips audibly parting would be .

The IPA chart shades out bilabial lateral consonants, which is sometimes read as indicating that such sounds are not possible. The fricatives and are often lateral, but since no language makes a distinction for centrality, the allophony is not noticeable.

References

Citations

Sources

General references

References

Maddieson, Ian. (2008). "The World Atlas of Language Structures Online". Max Planck Digital Library.
{{Harvcoltxt. Olson. 2004
de Souza, Isaac Costa. (2010). "A Phonological Description of "Pet Talk" in Arara". SIL Brazil.
Crawford, James M.. (1973). "Yuchi Phonology". International Journal of American Linguistics.
Heselwood, Barry. (2013). "Phonetic Transcription in Theory and Practice". Edinburgh University Press.

Wikipedia Source

This article was imported from Wikipedia and is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Content has been adapted to SurfDoc format. Original contributors can be found on the article history page.

place-of-articulation bilabial-consonants

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