IPA reference · consonant
ʋ — labiodental approximant
A /v/ with the friction removed.
How to make the labiodental approximant
Bottom lip approaches the top teeth as for /v/, but the gap stays wide enough that no turbulence is generated.
This sound does not occur in standard English. That means there is no word you can say to find it by accident; you have to build it from the articulatory instruction above and check it against a recording.
Languages that use it
Sounds it gets confused with
Most pronunciation errors are not random — they are a substitution of the nearest sound the speaker already owns. These are the usual substitutions for ʋ, and each one is a minimal-pair drill waiting to happen.
Too much friction.
Wrong place — English speakers pick one of the two and are wrong either way.
What this means for learners
Hindi does not distinguish v and w at all; both are /ʋ/, which is why Hindi speakers of English vary between them.
Teaching this sound
Describing a sound in words gets a student roughly half the way there. The other half is hearing it produced correctly, immediately after producing it incorrectly, with both versions available to replay. That is the argument for recording during the lesson rather than after it: the student leaves with your model of ʋ attached to the actual words they got wrong, not to an abstract chart.
Frequently asked questions
What sound does the IPA symbol ʋ make?
ʋ is the labiodental approximant. A /v/ with the friction removed. It does not occur in standard English.
How do you pronounce ʋ?
Bottom lip approaches the top teeth as for /v/, but the gap stays wide enough that no turbulence is generated.
Which languages have the labiodental approximant?
Among the languages covered here: Dutch (water, “water”); Hindi (वह, “he/she”).
What is the difference between ʋ and v?
Too much friction.