verb
- removing or reducing the rounding or lip involvement in the articulation of a speech sound
Usage: linguistics; phonetics
Examples
- In some dialects, the process of delabializing certain vowels changes their acoustic quality.
- Linguists study how languages undergo delabializing shifts over generations.
- The speaker was delabializing the rounded vowel, making it sound more like an unrounded variant.
- Delabializing can occur as a natural phonetic change in language evolution.