Voiced labiodental fricative
| Voiced labiodental fricative | |
|---|---|
| v | |
| IPA number | 129 |
| Encoding | |
| Entity (decimal) | v |
| Unicode (hex) | U+0076 |
| X-SAMPA | v |
| Kirshenbaum | v |
| Braille |  |
| Sound | |
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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 ⟨v⟩, and the equivalent X-SAMPA symbol is v.
Although this is a familiar sound to most European and Middle Eastern listeners, it is cross-linguistically a fairly uncommon sound, being only a quarter as frequent as [w]. The presence of [v] and absence of [w], is a very distinctive areal feature of European languages and those of adjacent areas of Siberia and Central Asia. Speakers of East Asian languages that lack this sound tend to pronounce it as [b] (Korean and Japanese), or [f]/[w] (Cantonese and Mandarin), thus failing to distinguish a number of English minimal pairs.
In certain languages, such as Danish,Faroese,Icelandic or Norwegian the voiced labiodental fricative is in a free variation with the labiodental approximant.
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