The voiced bilabial flap is an uncommon non-
rhotic flap. It is usually, and perhaps always, an
allophone
In phonology, an allophone (; from the Greek , , 'other' and , , 'voice, sound') is one of multiple possible spoken soundsor '' phones''used to pronounce a single phoneme in a particular language. For example, in English, the voiceless plos ...
of the
labiodental flap, though it is the preferred allophone in a minority of languages such as
Banda and some of its neighbors.
In
Mono, the sound has been described as follows:
And, for allophony between the bilabial and labiodental flap,
In the literature it has often been transcribed by a ''w'' modified by the
extra-short
The International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) uses a breve to indicate a speech sound (usually a vowel) with extra-short Vowel length, duration. That is, is a very short vowel with the quality of . An example from English is the short schwa of the ...
diacritic, .
is an unofficial symbol for this sound. It is a conflation between and .
In 2005 the International Phonetic Association adopted the ''right hook v'' symbol to represent the labiodental flap. Since then, the received transcription of the bilabial flap involves employing the labiodental flap symbol modified by an
advanced
The Advanced Party (), otherwise known as the Advanced Association () was a liberal and centrist Zionist political association in Mandatory Palestine founded by several urban liberal Zionists. The party was founded in order to represent the voice ...
diacritic: .
Since flaps are similar to brief stops, it could alternatively be transcribed as .
Occurrence
Notes
References
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Further reading
*Olson and Hajek, 2001
'The Geographic and Genetic Distribution of the Labial Flap'*
External links
*
{{IPA navigation
Bilabial consonants
Tap and flap consonants
Pulmonic consonants