Bilabials

Bilabial sounds involve both lips as the articulators. (If you wanted to be hyper-consistent about always having an active and a passive articulator, you could say that the lower lip is the active articulator and the upper lip is the passive. The lower lip does usually move more than the upper lip when making a bilabial sound, but the upper lip moves too, so it's not really "passive".)

The English bilabial sounds are [p], [b], and [m].

[p] or [b]

It's possible to make bilabial fricatives by not closing the lips completely and leaving an opening narrow enough to cause turbulent airflow. To English speakers, these sound like [f] and [v].

• [ɸ]: the voiceless bilabial fricative, symbolized by the Greek letter phi. Examples:

  • Japanese: [ɸɯdʒi] Fuji
    ([ɸ] in Japanese is an allophone of a phoneme that includes [h].)

• [β]: the voiced bilabial fricative, symbolized by the Greek letter beta. Examples:
• Spanish: [sɛɾβesa] cerveza 'beer'
  ([β] is an allophone of /b/ in Spanish.)

Languages where bilabial and labiodental fricatives are contrasting sounds are rare. Ewe (Niger-Congo, Ghana and Togo) is one:

As we've seen, one of the two articulations involved in [] is lip rounding (which can be described as a bilabial approximant).

bilabial trill

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