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Labial consonants are consonants in which one or bothlips are theactive articulator. The two common labial articulations arebilabials, articulated using both lips, andlabiodentals, articulated with the lower lip against the upper teeth, both of which are present inEnglish. A third labial articulation isdentolabials, articulated with the upper lip against the lower teeth (the reverse of labiodental), normally only found in pathological speech. Generally precluded arelinguolabials, in which the tip of thetongue contacts the posterior side of the upper lip, making themcoronals, though sometimes, they behave as labial consonants.[clarification needed]
The most common distribution between bilabials and labiodentals is theEnglish one, in which thenasal and thestops,[m],[p], and[b], are bilabial and thefricatives,[f], and[v], are labiodental. Thevoiceless bilabial fricative,voiced bilabial fricative, and thebilabial approximant do not exist as the primary realizations of any sounds inEnglish, but they occur in many languages. For example, theSpanish consonant writtenb orv is pronounced, between vowels, as avoiced bilabial approximant.
Lip rounding, orlabialization, is a commonapproximant-likeco-articulatory feature. English/w/ is avoiced labialized velar approximant, which is far more common than the purelylabial approximant [β̞]. In thelanguages of the Caucasus, labializeddorsals like /kʷ/ and /qʷ/ are very common.
Very few languages, however, make a distinction purely betweenbilabials andlabiodentals, making "labial" usually a sufficient specification of a language'sphonemes. One exception isEwe, which has both kinds of fricatives, but the labiodentals are produced with greater articulatory force.
While most languages make use of purely labial phonemes, a few generally lack them. Examples areTlingit,Eyak (bothNa-Dené),Wichita (Caddoan), and theIroquoian languages exceptCherokee.[citation needed]
Many of these languages are transcribed with/w/ and withlabialized consonants. However, it is not always clear to what extent the lips are involved in such sounds. In the Iroquoian languages, for example,/w/ involved little apparent rounding of the lips. See theTillamook language for an example of a language with "rounded" consonants and vowels that do not have any actual labialization. All of these languages have seen labials introduced under the influence of English.
