A voiced labiodental approximant is a type of consonantal sound, used in some spokenlanguages. It is something between an English /w/ and /v/, pronounced with the teeth and lips held in the position used to articulate the letter V. The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents this sound is ⟨ʋ⟩, a letter v with a leftward hook protruding from the upper right of the letter. In some sources, this letter indicates a bilabial approximant,[1][2] though this is more accurately transcribed with an advanced diacritic, ⟨ʋ̟⟩.
A labiodental approximant is the typical realization of /v/ in the Indian South African variety of English. As the voiceless /f/ is also realized as an approximant ([ʋ̥]), it is also an example of a language contrasting voiceless and voiced labiodental approximants.[3]
/v/ is a phonetic fricative, although it has less frication than /f/. However, it does not interact with unvoiced consonants in clusters as a fricative would, and so is considered to be phonologically a sonorant (approximant).[20][21] See Serbo-Croatian Phonology
↑Ladefoged, Peter (1968). A Phonetic Study of West African Languages: An Auditory-instrumental Survey (2nded.). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. p.26. ISBN9780521069632.
↑Schmid, Stephan (2010). "Segmental features of Swiss German ethnolects". In Calamai, Silvia; Celata, Chiara; Ciucci, Luca (eds.). Proceedings of the Workshop "Sociophonetics, at the crossroads of speech variation, processing and communication". Edizioni della Normale. pp.69–72. ISBN978-88-7642-434-2. Archived from the original on 4 March 2016. Retrieved 27 April 2015.
Canepari, Luciano (1999) [1992], Il MªPi – Manuale di pronuncia italiana[Handbook of Italian Pronunciation] (in Italian) (2ed.), Bologna: Zanichelli, ISBN88-08-24624-8
Dum-Tragut, Jasmine (2009), Armenian: Modern Eastern Armenian, Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company
Foulkes, Paul; Docherty, Gerard J., eds. (1999), Urban Voices, Arnold
Mesthrie, Rajend (2004). "Indian South African English: phonology". In Schneider, Edgar W.; Burridge, Kate; Kortmann, Bernd; Mesthrie, Rajend; Upton, Clive (eds.). A handbook of varieties of English. Vol.1: Phonology. Mouton de Gruyter. pp.953–963. ISBN3-11-017532-0.
