Labiodental approximant in the context of Voiceless labiodental approximant

A voiced bilabial fricative is a type of consonantal sound, used in some spoken languages. The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents this sound is either a Latin or Greek-style beta, ⟨β⟩.

This letter is also often used to represent a voiced bilabial approximant, though that is more precisely written with a lowering diacritic, that is ⟨β̞⟩. That sound may also be transcribed as an advanced labiodental approximant ⟨ʋ̟⟩, in which case the diacritic is again frequently omitted, since no contrast is likely. It has been proposed that either a turned ⟨β⟩ or reversed ⟨β⟩, among others, be used as a dedicated symbol for the bilabial approximant, but despite occasional usage none of them have gained general acceptance.

A 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⟩.

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 [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 may pronounce it as [b] (Korean and Japanese), or [f]/[w] (Cantonese and Mandarin), and thus be unable to distinguish between a number of English minimal pairs.