Voiceless bilabial plosive

The voiceless bilabial plosive or stop is a type of consonantal sound used in most spoken languages. The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents this sound is ⟨p⟩, and the equivalent X-SAMPA symbol is.

Features


Features of the voiceless bilabial plosive:

Occurrence
Research has shown that incidental learning positively impacts the acquisition of the /p/ sound for Arabic speakers and other EFL learners. This is particularly interesting given that the stop is missing from about 10% of languages that have a. (See voiced velar stop for another such gap.) This is an areal feature of the circum-Saharan zone (Africa north of the equator plus the Arabian peninsula). It is not known how old this areal feature is, and whether it might be a recent phenomenon due to Arabic as a prestige language (Arabic shifted to  but the timing of this change is not known), or whether Arabic was itself affected by a more ancient areal pattern. It is found in other areas as well; for example, Fijian, Onge, and many Papuan languages have but no.

Nonetheless, the sound is very common cross-linguistically. Most languages have at least a plain, and some distinguish more than one variety. Many Indo-Aryan languages, such as Hindustani, have a two-way contrast between the aspirated and the plain  (also transcribed as  in extensions to the IPA).