Do Japanese actually pronounce the "v" sound? They do have a kana character
(ヴ) dedicated to transcribing foreign "v" sounds, but do they actually
pronounce them like the English phoneme /v/ (using the upper teeth and the
lower lip)? Or is it like a "weak" /b/ in Spanish, which is actually [/β/
(using both lips)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voiced_bilabial_fricative)?
CC BY-SA 3.0
2015-05-24T12:08:02.820
24498
2019-08-22T07:33:28.900
2019-08-22T07:33:28.900
1628
10168
question
pronunciation katakana loanwords phonetics
Do Japanese actually pronounce the "v" sound?
tl;dr: It varies, but it is usually a weak "b".

It varies from person to person, so some may pronounce it like the English
"v", but others may use a strong "b" sound.

Originally, Japanese had no ヴ character so they used variations of ビ (bi). I
think some Japanese might be able to do it, but they find it quite awkward.
That's why television is called テレビ (terebi), it's hard for them to pronounce
so they changed the sound. It's in the same vein as why they stick vowel
sounds on the end of borrowed foreign words that end in constanants.

ヴ was probably introduced in order to reduce confusion and to retain accuracy
when transliterating.
CC BY-SA 3.0
2015-05-24T20:55:57.030
24508
2015-05-24T20:55:57.030
10171
24498
answer
I think on _reading_ ヴァ, ヴィ, etc., people usually try to pronounce it
differently from バ, ビ, etc., but with varying success. In fact, I think most
Japanese that try to distinguish ヴァ and バ pronounce what would be //v// indeed
like the Spanish [[β]], a voiced bilabial fricative (or like a combination
like [[bβ]]). That seems to make sense since the voiceless bilabial fricative
[[ɸ]] is already present in Japanese (in フ [[ɸɯ]] and as ファ, フィ, etc. in
loanwords).

I think one should point out, though, that while the katakana ヴ exists and is
gaining ground, there is no particular standard of spelling words with ヴ and
one will most often encounter the spelling with バ etc. and only rarely
encounter the spelling with ヴ. Loanwords that were loaned a long time ago are
usually much more resistant to respelling. For example, バージョン is rarely
spelled ヴァージョン:

> [BCCWJ](http://www.ninjal.ac.jp/english/products/bccwj/) corpus, accessible
> via <http://www.kotonoha.gr.jp/shonagon/>
>
> バージョン 1366 results  
>  ヴァージョン 107 results

Major monolingual dictionaries, such as 大辞林, in fact still don't use ヴ at all
and just note:

>
> [**ヴ**](https://kotobank.jp/word/%E3%83%B4-208607#E5.A4.A7.E8.BE.9E.E6.9E.97.20.E7.AC.AC.E4.B8.89.E7.89.88)
>
> 外来語の［v］の音を書き表すのに用いられる片仮名表記。
> 〔本辞典では「ヴァ」「ヴィ」「ヴ」「ヴェ」「ヴォ」の表記は用いず，原則としてバ行の片仮名を用いた。「ヴァージン→バージン」「ヴィオラ→ビオラ」「ヴント→ブント」「ヴェール→ベール」「ヴォリューム→ボリューム」。なお「ワイマール」「ウィーン」のように「ワ」「ウ」を用いたものもある〕

That is, ヴ is taken to be a particular katakana notation to indicate that a
loanword was spelled with V. 大辞林 writes all loanwords containing V (e.g.
ヴァージン, ヴィオラ, etc.) with バビブベボ (like バージン, ビオラ, etc.).

## tl;dr

In any case, I think it can be said that the //v// phoneme doesn't (yet) exist
in Japanese and for those speakers that do recognize it as different from
//b//, it's almost never the voiced labiodental fricative [[v]], but rather
the voiced bilabial fricative [[β]].
CC BY-SA 3.0
2015-05-24T23:29:00.167
24509
2017-06-10T12:33:11.437
2020-06-17T08:18:27.500
-1
1628
24498
answer