The Lips 👄

The lips can communicate even without making a sound. Visuals are a huge component of communication.

The lips are important for communication.

There is no doubt about it.

The lips are needed to create different sounds and are also expressive for visually communicating too. Your lips shape your sound and control airflow.

Anatomy

We've got a top lip and a bottom lip. And together, we've got the lips.

Now there are a few actions the lips can take. Most of the time the lips move in unison (i.e. they do the same action) but they can also be independent of each other (i.e. think curling your lower lip versus curling your upper lip, you do not HAVE to curl both).

Lip Retraction. 😊

The lips can retract. That means they spread out. Pay attention to your neutral face and then your smiling face. You can only make certain sounds when your lips spread out. Like the letter 'E' or letter 'A'.

Lip Protrusion. 😚

The lips can also protrude. That means they push forward in space and bunch up. Like when you pronouncing the letter 'U'. If you put a finger in front of your lips and say 'U', you can feel your lips push forward into your finger. You also bunch up your lips when you are kissing 😚 or whistling.

Lip Seal. 😐

You can also firmly seal your lips. Pay attention to how your lips feel or the active muscle use in your lips when you puff out your cheeks. You accomplish this by having a firm lip seal so the air doesn't escape from your mouth or your nose. Now, compare that feeling of puffing out your cheeks to when you say the 'P' or 'B' sounds.

You get the same lip seal muscle activity - for a split second.

If you continue to force air through a firm lip seal, you get a lip trill (like you are blowing raspberries or doing vocal warmups). In English, that isn't a distinct or communicatively meaningful sound, but in other languages it is - like Pirahã, the language of the indigenous isolated Pirahã people of Amazonas, Brazil.

Lip Curl. 🥴

Your top lip can curl down. Your bottom lip can curl up. In English, we focus on the bottom lip curling up in speech. We use this for sounds like 'F' and 'V'. We also communicate visually with lip curls when biting a lower lip (risqué, I know). Again, this highlights the nonverbal communicative role the lips can play.

Appearances

The lips and jaw (discussed last week) are both vital for visual communication - they are parts of the process that you can see. You can't see the vocal cords. You can't see the lungs. You can see the lips and you can see the jaw position. Sometimes you can see the tongue but most of the time you can't. These are important for your listener.

So, it is important to remember that the lips contribute substantially to facial expressions and nonverbal communication. If you are smiling when you talk versus if you are frowning or pouting when you talk, even if the words that you say are the same, the communicated message can be different.

The visual of the lips can even help those with hearing loss understand speech without needing to perceive the actual sounds. This is how some people who have hearing loss 'lip read'.

That is exactly why for some people, especially now with COVID19, interacting with people wearing masks can be harder. One aspect of the difficulty (besides the sounds being muffled) is the lack of visual supporting information.

Precision

When we get lazy or sloppy or the lips don't move exactly like they should, the resulting speech sounds suffer. This is why after going to the dentist and having your lip frozen impacts your speech clarity. It can also be why your sounds can be muffled or unclear when you are bored or apathetic - because you aren't moving the lips as much as you should to be the clearest sounding. When we're lazy, not trying, not focused on our speech, or disinterested, it can be communicated through our speech.

Many times, non-native English speakers are shy or nervous about their speech so they rush through, hoping people don't hear their mispronunciations. But that behaviour can make their precision worse. That means that the sounds are less clear, it becomes harder to hear and actually draws MORE attention to their pronunciation. Speaking slower and precisely is actually the better way to go!

So the question is...

Do you have control over your lips? Can you confidently say you know what they do for each sound you make? Are you aware of the nonverbal cues your lips are communicating when you aren't speaking? These can all impact your speech, your pronunciation, your communication and your vibe. This is 100% also applicable to your Working From Home setup. You may not feel like you need to smile, but if you are on camera, people will look and see if you are smiling...and make assumptions that you aren't happy to be there, you aren't paying attention, or you are not interested when those might not be true!

So think about it. Maybe you have been misinterpreted once or twice and it wasn’t because of the words you said but the emotion or lack of emotion that was communicated with your message.

Let me know below if I missed a function of the lips or if you can think of something that I didn’t mention. Or if something I said gave you an A-ha moment.