Labiodental consonant
In phonetics, labiodentals are consonants articulated with the lower lip and the upper teeth, such as and.
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 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.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 ''. They may also be found in children's speech or as speech impediments.