Labiodental consonant

Labiodental consonants in the IPA

The labiodental consonants identified by the International Phonetic Alphabet are:

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 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 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 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 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.

References

Sources

References

1. (Fall 1993). "Phonetic structures of Khonoma Angami". Linguistics of the Tibeto-Burman Area.
2. (July 1924). "Ts'ets'aut, an Athapascan Language from Portland Canal, British Columbia". International Journal of American Linguistics.
3. Tharp, George W.. (January 1972). "The Position of the Tsetsaut among Northern Athapaskans". International Journal of American Linguistics.
4. Ballantyne, Keira Gebbie. (2005). "Textual Structure and Discourse Prominence in Yapese Narrative". University of Hawaiʻi.
5. John Laver (1994: 323) ''Principles of Phonetics''.
6. IPA. (2018). "Consonants (Pulmonic)".
7. (2007). "Teaching phoneme awareness to pre-literate children with speech disorder: a randomized controlled trial". International Journal of Language & Communication Disorders.
8. Staff, ScienceAlert. (2019-03-14). "The Rise of Farming And Soft Foods Might Have Forever Changed The Way Humans Speak".
9. George, Alison. "Humans couldn't pronounce 'f' and 'v' sounds before farming developed".