Happy Valentine's Day, everyone! Today is the day to be giving that special someone all the kisses you can! But have you ever wonder what exactly a "kiss" or at least a typical "kissing sound" is, linguistically?
The act of kissing itself is not a speech sound and does not have any method of transcription in IPA, but the sound we often make when imitating a kiss – often transcribed in English as "muah" or "mwah" – actually is; it's a bilabial click [ʘ]. Clicks are sounds that are made by pulling in air through suddenly dropping the back of tongue from the soft palate (velum); this is called "velaric ingressive" airflow and is what gives clicks, and therefore the kiss, their harsh, noisy sound. It is also a bilabial sound, meaning that it is produced by bringing both lips into contact. Bilabial consonants, such as the bilabial click, however, are by default compressed, rather than protruded, unlike rounded vowels which are typically protruded rather than compressed. This means that when making bilabial consonants such as [m], [p], or [b], our lips are brought together endolabially (through compression), but when making rounded vowel sounds such as [u] and [o], our lips are brought together exolabially (through protrusion). Try making those sounds and see what your lips do! These are the default mechanisms but of course not the only ones that exist; Japanese "u" is compressed rather than protruded, and our kissing sound is protruded rather than compressed. For specifying exolabial labialization (protrusion), the superscripted w [ʷ] can be used, and for specifying endolabial labialization (compression), the superscripted beta [ᵝ] can be used. In this case, we want to specify that the lips are protruded (exolabial) for our bilabial click, so we use [ʘʷ] for the kissing sound!
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