Where Found
Labialization is the most widespread secondary articulation in the world's languages. It is phonemically contrastive in Northwest Caucasian (e.g. Adyghe), Athabaskan, and Salishan language families, among others. This contrast is reconstructed also for Proto-Indo-European, the common ancestor of the Indo-European languages.
American English has three degrees of labialization: tight rounded (/w/), slight rounded (/ʃ/, /ʒ/, /tʃ/, /dʒ/, initial /r/), and unrounded, which in vowels is sometimes called 'spread'. These secondary articulations are not universal. For example, French shares the English slight rounding of /ʃ/, /ʒ/ while Russian does not have slight rounding in its postalveolar fricatives (/ʂ ʐ ɕ ʑ/).
A few languages, including Arrernte and Mba, have contrastive labialized forms for almost all of their consonants.
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“The living language is like a cowpath: it is the creation of the cows themselves, who, having created it, follow it or depart from it according to their whims or their needs. From daily use, the path undergoes change. A cow is under no obligation to stay in the narrow path she helped make, following the contour of the land, but she often profits by staying with it and she would be handicapped if she didn’t know where it was or where it led to.”
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