The labiodental flap is a speech sound found primarily in languages of Central Africa, such as Kera and Mangbetu. It has also been reported in the Austronesian language Sika. It is one of the few non-rhotic flaps.

The sound begins with the lower lip placed behind the upper teeth. The lower lip is then flipped outward, striking the upper teeth in passing.

When described in the literature, it is often transcribed with an ad hoc use of the extra-short diacritic, . The v with left loop symbol

This symbol is a combination of + (the symbols for the voiced labiodental fricative and the alveolar flap). As of version 5.1.0, the Unicode character set encodes this character at U+2C71 (). If interoperability is not needed, some fonts include the "Latin small letter v with right hook" glyph as a private use character in the PUA area of Unicode used by SIL International, as U+F25F (?).

The bilabial flap is a variant of the labiodental flap in several languages, including Mono. This sound involves striking the upper lip rather than the upper teeth. The two sounds are not known to contrast in any language; the term labial flap can be used as a broader description encompassing both sounds.

In Sika, the flap is heard in careful pronunciation, but it may also be realized as a voiced labiodental plosive, or , or an affricate. It contrasts with both a bilabial and a labiodental fricative,

External links

• A Crosslinguistic Lexicon of the Labial Flap (has video & sound files)
• SIL Linguist Successfully Proposes New Phonetic Symbol
• Kenneth S. Olson's research website (has information on the labiodental flap)

Bibliography

• Olson, Kenneth S.; & Hajek, John. (1999). The phonetic status of the labial flap. Journal of the International Phonetic Association, 29 (2), 101-114.
• Olson, Kenneth S.; & Hajek, John. (2003). Crosslinguistic insights on the labial flap. Linguistic Typology, 7, 157-186.

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