Harman Patil (Editor)

Voiceless bilabial fricative

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IPA number
  
126

Unicode (hex)
  
U+0278

Kirshenbaum
  
P

Entity (decimal)
  
ɸ

X-SAMPA
  
p\

Braille
  
Example

Voiceless bilabial fricative

The 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 ⟨ɸ⟩. For English-speakers, it is easiest to think of the sound as an f-sound made only with the lips, instead of the upper teeth and lower lip, or a blowing sound.

Features

Features of the voiceless bilabial fricative:

  • Its manner of articulation is fricative, which means it is produced by constricting air flow through a narrow channel at the place of articulation, causing turbulence.
  • Its place of articulation is bilabial, which means it is articulated with both lips.
  • Its phonation is voiceless, which means it is produced without vibrations of the vocal cords. In some languages the vocal cords are actively separated, so it is always voiceless; in others the cords are lax, so that it may take on the voicing of adjacent sounds.
  • It is an oral consonant, which means air is allowed to escape through the mouth only.
  • Because the sound is not produced with airflow over the tongue, the central–lateral dichotomy does not apply.
  • The airstream mechanism is pulmonic, which means it is articulated by pushing air solely with the lungs and diaphragm, as in most sounds.

    • References

    Voiceless bilabial fricative Wikipedia
    (Text) CC BY-SA


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