labiovelars

Labiovelars, or labial-velars, are consonants that are articulated with a single gesture involving both the lips (labial) and the velum (velar). This dual place of articulation means the sound is produced at once at the lips and at the velum, rather than as two separate articulations in sequence.

In the International Phonetic Alphabet, the most common labiovelar stops are written as k͡p (voiceless) and g͡b (voiced). These can occur as distinct phonemes in a language, or, in some analyses, described as sequences of a labial stop and a velar stop, depending on how the language’s sound system is analyzed. While stops are the best-attested labiovelars, the literature sometimes describes other sonorants or fricatives in a labial-velar space, though such examples are comparatively rare.

Distribution and orthography vary by language. Labiovelars are relatively uncommon cross-linguistically but are well documented in several language families, particularly in West Africa within the Niger-Congo languages. In many orthographies that encode African languages, these sounds are written with digraphs such as kp for a voiceless labiovelar stop and gb for a voiced one, reflecting their dual place of articulation. The IPA representation uses the tie-bar notation k͡p and g͡b to indicate simultaneous labial and velar articulation.

Overall, labiovelars represent a distinct articulatory category that blends labial and velar gestures, most often realized as stops, and they play a notable role in the phoneme inventories of certain languages.