Common Stops
All languages in the world have stops, and most have at least the voiceless stops, and . However, there are exceptions: Colloquial Samoan lacks the coronal, and several North American languages, such as the northern Iroquoian and southern Iroquoian languages (i.e., Cherokee), lack the labial . In fact, the labial is the least stable of the voiceless stops in the languages of the world, as the unconditioned sound change → (→ → Ø) is quite common in unrelated languages, having occurred in the history of Classical Japanese, Classical Arabic, and Proto-Celtic, for instance. Formal Samoan has only one word with velar ; colloquial Samoan conflates /t/ and /k/ to /k/. Ni‘ihau Hawaiian has for /k/ to a greater extent than Standard Hawaiian, but neither distinguish a /k/ from a /t/. It may be more accurate to say that Hawaiian and colloquial Samoan do not distinguish velar and coronal stops than to say they lack one or the other.
See Common occlusives for the distribution of both stops and nasals.
Read more about this topic: Stop Consonant
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