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 ⟨v⟩, and the equivalent X-SAMPA symbol is.

The sound is similar to voiced alveolar fricative /z/ in that it is familiar to most European speakers but is a fairly uncommon sound cross-linguistically, occurring in approximately 21.1% of languages. Moreover, most languages that have /z/ also have /v/ and similarly to /z/, the overwhelming majority of languages with [v] are languages of Europe, Africa, or Western Asia, although the similar labiodental approximant /ʋ/ is also common in India. The presence of and absence of, 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 may pronounce it as (Korean and Japanese), or / (Cantonese and Mandarin), and thus be unable to distinguish between 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.

Features
Features of the voiced labiodental fricative: