In phonetics, a bilabial consonant is a labial consonant articulated with both lips.

Frequency

Bilabial consonants are very common across languages. Only around 0.7% of the world's languages lack bilabial consonants altogether, including Taushiro, Tlingit, Chipewyan, Oneida, and Wichita, though all of these have a labial–velar approximant .

Varieties

Some bilabial consonants identified by the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) are:

Owere Igbo has a six-way contrast among bilabial stops: .

The IPA chart shades out bilabial lateral consonants. This is because lateral consonants are defined as ones in which the airflow passes over the side of the tongue; the category therefore does not apply to labial consonants. (See also labiodental consonant, which very commonly have airflow at the side of the mouth.)

Other varieties

The extensions to the IPA also define a () for smacking the lips together. A lip-smack in the non-percussive sense of the lips audibly parting would be an ingressive .

See also

• Place of articulation

• Index of phonetics articles

References

Citations

Sources