Linguolabial consonant
Template:Use American English Template:Short description Template:Infobox IPA
Linguolabials or apicolabials<ref>The term apicolabial is older, but Ladefoged and Maddieson point out that often these sounds are not apical.</ref> are consonants articulated by placing the tongue tip or blade against the upper lip, which is drawn downward to meet the tongue. They represent one extreme of a coronal articulatory continuum which extends from linguolabial to subapical palatal places of articulation. Cross-linguistically, linguolabial consonants are very rare. They are found in a cluster of languages in Vanuatu, in the Kajoko dialect of Bijago in Guinea-Bissau, in Umotína (a recently extinct Bororoan language of Brazil), and as paralinguistic sounds elsewhere. They are also relatively common in disordered speech, and the diacritic is specifically provided for in the extensions to the IPA.
Linguolabial consonants are transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet by adding the "seagull"Template:Sfnp diacritic, Template:Unichar, to the corresponding alveolar consonant. Template:Harvcoltxt additionally suggest these sound may be equivalently transcribed with the apical diacritic, Template:Unichar, on the corresponding bilabial consonant.<ref>Template:Cite book They note that the apical diacritic was added to the IPA after the linguolabial diacritic, and would have made the latter unnecessary. An example of such usage in an IPA publication is in A. Haudricourt (1968) de lɑ̃ːg melanezjɛn a tɔ̃ ɑ̃ nuvɛl kaledɔni. Le Maître Phonétique, vol. 46 (83), no. 129.</ref> However, Template:Harvcoltxt reject this transcription, as linguolabials may be articulated either apical or laminal.
By analogy of the distinction made between labiodentals and dentolabials, labiolinguals may be distinguished as consonants articulated by placing the bottom of the tongue tip or blade against the lower lip. Template:Clear
Description
Linguolabials are produced by constricting the airflow between the tongue and the upper lip. They are attested in a number of manners of articulation including stops, nasals, and fricatives, and can be produced with the tip of the tongue (apical), blade of the tongue (laminal), or the bottom of the tongue (sublaminal).Template:SfnpTemplate:Sfnp Acoustically they are more similar to alveolars than bilabials. Linguolabials can be distinguished from bilabials and alveolars acoustically by formant transitions and nasal resonances.Template:Sfnp
List of consonants
Linguolabials as a diachronic stage in sound shifts
In Vanuatu, some of the Santo–Malekula languages have shifted historically from bilabial to alveolar consonants via an intermediate linguolabial stage, which remains in other Santo and Malekula languages.
While labials have become linguolabial before nonrounded vowels in various languages (e.g. Tangoa, Araki, Nese), the sound shift went further in languages such as Tolomako, which shifted the linguolabials to full alveolar consonants: *b > *[p] > p̈ Template:IPA > t [t]; *m > m̈ Template:IPA > n [n]. Thus, POc *bebe Template:Gloss > Template:IPA (spelled Template:Lang in Tangoa or in Araki<ref>A. François, An online Araki-English-French dictionary. Electronic publication: entry p̈ep̈e</ref>) later became Template:IPA in Tolomako. Likewise, POc *tama Template:Gloss > Template:IPA (cf. Tangoa Template:Lang, Araki Template:Lang<ref>A. François, An online Araki-English-French dictionary. Electronic publication: entry r̄am̈a</ref>) > Tolomako Template:IPA.