Voiced labiodental fricative

The voiced labiodental fricative is a type of consonantal sound used in some spoken languages. The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents this sound is , and the equivalent X-SAMPA symbol is v.

Features

Features of the voiced labiodental fricative:

Its manner of articulation is fricative, which means it is produced by constricting air flow through a narrow channel at the place of articulation, causing turbulence.
Its place of articulation is labiodental which means it is articulated with the lower lips and the upper teeth.
Its phonation type is voiced, which means the vocal cords are vibrating during the articulation.
It is an oral consonant, which means air is allowed to escape through the mouth.
It is a central consonant, which means it is produced by allowing the airstream to flow over the middle of the tongue, rather than the sides.
The airstream mechanism is pulmonic egressive, which means it is articulated by pushing air out of the lungs and through the vocal tract, rather than from the glottis or the mouth.

In English

The voiced labiodental fricative occurs in English, and it is the sound denoted by the letter "v" in visit or rave. Speakers of languages in which it is lacking, such as Japanese, most dialects of Chinese, and many Indo-Aryan languages, may pronounce it as a voiced bilabial plosive or an approximant.

In other languages

Spanish

In European Spanish, the sound /v/ was different to /b/ in the pre-classic period, but during the XIV and XV century the labiodental consonant began to merge with /b/ in the standard language. There is no general agreement on the phonetic nature of the old phoneme /v/, some linguists think the spelling "v" should be labiodental, like English /v/ (see Dámaso Alonso), but others (Menéndez Pidal) think pre-classic "v" was a fricative bilabial consonant, No matter its real pronunciation, most studies agree that the phoneme /v/ (or perhaps /β/) was not distinguished from bilabial /b/ after the XVII century. The distinction between /v/ and /b/ was probably retained some time after the XVII century in some isolated dialects, but in present-day Spanish, both in America and Europe, the merger of /v/ and /b/ as a bilabial plosive ^* (between vowels) is certainly complete. This leads to one of the most common misspellings in Spanish, causing people to often spell the "v" as "b" and vice-versa; for example, people might sometimes spell bajar and derivada as "vajar" and "deribada". A common workaround is to spell the "b" as B grande (big B), and the "v" as B chica (small B), since the lowercase b is taller than the lowercase v. Some educated speakers, especially in America (where the influence of English is strong), still try to distinguish phonemes /v/ and /b/ on spelling bases, but the Spanish Real Academia no longer supports such distinction which is seen as foreigner or affected in modern Spanish.

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Features

In English

In other languages

Spanish

See also