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 v.

Although this is a familiar sound to most European listeners, it is cross-linguistically a fairly uncommon sound, being only a quarter as frequent as . The presence of and absence of, along with the presence of otherwise unknown front rounded vowels, is a very distinctive areal feature of European languages and those of adjacent areas of Siberia and Central Asia. Speakers of East Asian languages which lack this sound like Mandarin tend to pronounce as, Japanese as, and Cantonese as, thus failing to distinguish a number of English minimal pairs.