LANGUAGE - Bilabial sounds in English and other languages

The theme of the blogpost today is bilabial sounds, those sounds produced involving the lips, and I have to admit I'm having one or two problems with the English language at the moment: in particular, certain sounds have been giving me trouble. Having suffered a recent minor injury to the lips of my mouth, my speech was modified due to the injury for a short while. I found that after my minor injury, a number of sounds became difficult and in fact painful to say, causing me to rethink how we produce the sounds.

Please note the picture (stolen from some website or other) does not illustrate my lips, of course, they are the lips of Angelina Jolie, and is an image placed on the blog so that a reader may recognise a corkin' good pair of lips. I don't feel a picture of my injured lips would be beneficial for publication at this point.

In English, there area number of phonemes that would be affected by problems with the lips, namely p, b, and m. Similarly affected are f and v, and also w. However, due to the minor injury, my bilabials were all over the shop, and rather than plosive bilabial sounds, at one point, in order to have minimal contact between the lips, I was replacing p and b with fricative bilabials, namely ɸ and β. I think I even might have produced a voiced labiodental nasal ɱ at one stage, instead of the voiced nasal bilabial m. The voiced labial-velar approximant, w, also gave me trouble, but I modified a rounded back close u vowel to overcome this briefly. The result? I might have sounded slightly different, but most people may not have noticed, given the similarities between numerous sounds.

Perhaps it would have been easier to have spoken a language without labial sounds. I did not think such languages existed, until I found the interesting fact about this range of sounds is that there are indeed languages that lack bilabials, including Eyak (which also lacks/lacked nasals), Chipewyan, Oneida, and Tlingit. All of these languages are from North America; whether this lack of bilabials is uniquely a North American thing, I don't know (I admit I don't know that much about North American languages, but it's a field I've been interested in for some time). Wichita (with only one fluent speaker remaining) is also cited as lacking labial sounds, but in fact contains them in only two words: kammac to grind corn and camma:ci to hoe, to cultivate. I can only guess at this, but a presumption may perhaps be made on the lack of labial sounds elsewhere in the language that those two words are borrowings into Wichita from another language, possibly from the same root, given the similar sounds and linked semantic theme.

All this has been an interesting (albeit unfortunate and painful) journey into phonetics. I have now regained (mostly) the power of normal speech, and so seemingly have now lost the ability to form some more interesting bilabial sounds, but it leaves me more appreciative of an entire range of phonemes. I also have discovered information about some languages I had not known much about before. That's the joy of being a linguanaut!