Labiodental consonant

Places of articulation
Labial     Bilabial         Labial–velar         Labial–coronal     Labiodental     Dentolabial Bidental Coronal     Linguolabial     Interdental     Dental     Denti-alveolar     Alveolar     Postalveolar         Palato-alveolar         Retroflex Dorsal     Postalveolar         Alveolo-palatal     Palatal         Labial–palatal     Velar     Uvular         Uvular–epiglottal Radical     Pharyngeal     Epiglotto-pharyngeal     Epiglottal     Guttural Glottal Peripheral
Tongue shape
Apical Laminal Subapical Lateral Sulcal Palatal Pharyngeal

In phonetics, labiodentals are consonants articulated with the lower lip and the upper teeth.

Labiodental consonant in IPA

The labiodental consonants identified by the International Phonetic Alphabet are:

IPA	Description	Example
		Language	Orthography	IPA	Meaning
p̪	voiceless labiodental stop	Greek	σάπφειρος	[ˈsap̪firo̞s̠]	sapphire
b̪	voiced labiodental stop	Sika	Allophone of /ⱱ/ in careful pronunciation.
p̪͡f	voiceless labiodental affricate	Tsonga	N/A	[tiɱp̪͡fuβu]	'hippos'
b̪͡v	voiced labiodental affricate	Tsonga	N/A	[ʃileb̪͡vu]	'chin'
ɱ	labiodental nasal	English	symphony	[ˈsɪɱfəni]	'symphony'
f	voiceless labiodental fricative	English	fan	[fæn]	'fan'
v	voiced labiodental fricative	English	van	[væn]	'van'
ʋ	labiodental approximant	Dutch	wang	[ʋɑŋ]	'cheek'
	labiodental flap	Mono	vwa	[ⱱa]	'send'
	labiodental click	Nǁng	ʘoe	[ʘ̪oe]	meat

The IPA symbol ɧ refers to a sound occurring in Swedish, officially described as similar to the velar fricative [x], but one dialectal variant is a rounded, velarized labiodental, less ambiguously rendered as [fˠʷ]. 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 (Olson & Hajek 2003). With most other manners of articulation, the norm are bilabial consonants (which together with labiodentals, form the class of labial consonants).

[ɱ] is quite common, but in all or nearly all languages in which it occurs, it occurs only as an allophone of /m/ before labiodental consonants such as /v/ and /f/. 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 bilabial-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.

See also

• Place of articulation
• List of phonetics topics
• Dentolabial consonant

References

• Ladefoged, Peter; Maddieson, Ian (1996). The Sounds of the World's Languages. Oxford: Blackwell. ISBN 0-631-19814-8. 
• Olson, Kenneth S. & John Hajek. 2003. Crosslinguistic insights on the labial flap. Linguistic Typology 7(2). 157–186. doi:10.1515/lity.2003.014