labiale

Labiale is a term used in linguistics and anatomy to denote relations to the lips. It is the feminine form in several Romance languages of the Latin labialis and corresponds in English to the word labial. In scholarly writing, labiale may be used to discuss lip-related articulations or features in non-English texts.

In articulatory phonetics, labial sounds are produced with the lips. The main categories are bilabial sounds, which involve both lips (for example p, b, m, and sometimes w in certain analyses), and labiodental sounds, produced with the lower lip and the upper teeth (such as f and v). Languages differ in how many and which labials they possess, and these sounds interact with other places of articulation such as dental, alveolar, and velar.

A related concept is secondary labialization, where a sound carries lip rounding as an additional articulatory feature. This is often indicated in transcription with a diacritic or a superscript [ʷ], as in the notation kʷ or tʷ. Labialization can affect both consonants and vowels and plays a role in phonological systems that contrast rounded versus unrounded lip configurations.

Usage notes: Labiale is commonly found in Italian, French, and other Romance-language linguistic literature to describe lip-related phenomena, while English-language sources typically use the term labial. The concept is widely applicable across languages and is important for phonetic transcription, articulatory description, and the study of prosody and phonology. See also: labial, bilabial, labiodental, lip.