A voiceless 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 , a Latinized form of the Greek letter Phi.

Features Features of a voiceless bilabial fricative:

Occurrence Language Word IPA Meaning Notes Ainu 'grandmother' Allophone of before Angor 'body' Bahuana Bengali Eastern dialects 'fruit' Allophone of in some eastern dialects; regular allophone of in western dialects Damin 'boomerang' EnglishScouseAllophone of . See British English phonology Ewe 'he polished' Contrasts with Italian Tuscan 'the captains' Postvocalic allophone of . See Italian phonology and Tuscan gorgia. Itelmen 'rain' Japanese / 'decay' Allophone of before . See Japanese phonology Kaingang 'seed' Korean / 'epiglottis' Allophone of before , , and . See Korean phonology Kwama 'basket' Māori 'genealogy' Now more commonly due to the influence of English. See Māori phonology.Nepali'vapour'Allophone of /pʰ/. See Nepali phonology Odoodee 'coconut' Okinawan 'type of spice' Spanish Some dialects 'outside' Non-standard variant of . See Spanish phonology North-Central Peninsular 'abdicate' Allophone of in the coda. In this dialect, the unvoiced coda obstruents - - are realized as fricatives only if they precede a voiced consonant; otherwise, they emerge as stops. Southern Peninsular 'yours' It varies with in some accents. Allophone of after .Shompenkofeoi'bench' Sylheti /fua 'boy' Tahitian 'snake' Allophone of Taruma'fire' Turkish Some speakers 'horizon' Allophone of before rounded vowels and, to a lesser extent, word-finally after rounded vowels. See Turkish phonology Turkmen 'factory' Yalë 'village'

Voiceless bilabial approximant

A voiceless bilabial approximant is a similar sound with less turbulent airflow. The IPA has no dedicated symbol that represents this sound, but it may be transcribed as (a lowered ), or equivalently (with the obsolete adjacent diacritic) to avoid clash with the ascender and descender.

Language Word IPA Meaning Notes Kamasau ngape 'bone' Allophone of the voiceless bilabial phoneme, described by different authors as either or . In free variation with , depending on the consonant position and dialect. Mazatec Mazatlán 'go' Primary realization of when pre-aspirated.

See also Index of phonetics articles

References

Sources

External links