labiodental

In phonetics, labiodentals are consonants articulated with the lower lip and the upper teeth. The labiodental consonants identified by the International Phonetic Alphabet are:

IPA	Description	Example
		Language	Orthography	IPA	Meaning
p̪	voiceless labiodental plosive
b̪	voiced labiodental plosive
p̪͡f	voiceless labiodental affricate	Tsonga3	N/A	[tim̪p̪͡fuβu]	hippos
b̪͡v	voiced labiodental affricate	Tsonga4	N/A	[ʃileb̪͡vu]	chin
	labiodental nasal	English	symphony1	[ˈsɪɱfəni]	symphony
	voiceless labiodental fricative	English	fan	[fæn]	fan
	voiced labiodental fricative	English	van	[væn]	van
	labiodental approximant	Dutch	wang	[ʋɑŋ]	cheek

Notes:

1. [ɱ] is an allophone of /m/ that occurs before /v/ and /f/.
2. The stops (the plosives and the nasal ɱ) are not confirmed to exist as separate phonemes in any language. They are sometimes written as ȹ ȸ (qp and db monograms).
3. This applies only to the XiNkuna dialect of Tsonga where it is a separate phoneme (with aspirated and unaspirate allophones in free variation. Please note these differ from the German bilabial-labiodental affricate which commences with a bilabial p.
4. Again, found only in the XiNkuna dialect.

See also

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

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