Labiodental consonant

The labiodental consonants identified by the International Phonetic Alphabet are: Consonants without a dedicated symbol in the IPA may be written as the corresponding bilabial consonant with the bridge diacritic for dentalization. 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 despite the fact that the airflow in the fricatives and is often at the side of the mouth. No language makes a distinction in the lateral or central location of the airflow, and perhaps because of this a lateral consonant is defined as one in which the airflow passes over the side of the tongue, and so does not apply to labial consonants. 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 Kukuya, 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. ==See also==