IPA reference · consonant
β — voiced bilabial fricative
The lips approach without closing and air passes between them with voicing.
How to make the voiced bilabial fricative
Start to say /b/ but stop just before the lips meet. Critically, the teeth are never involved — that is what separates it from /v/.
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
| Language | Example | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
| Spanish | lavar | to wash |
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 β, and each one is a minimal-pair drill waiting to happen.
English speakers use /v/, bringing the teeth to the lip. Spanish never does this.
Learners keep the full stop closure between vowels.
What this means for learners
In Spanish, b and v are the same phoneme: a stop at the start of an utterance or after a nasal, and this fricative everywhere else.
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 β attached to the actual words they got wrong, not to an abstract chart.
Frequently asked questions
What sound does the IPA symbol β make?
β is the voiced bilabial fricative. The lips approach without closing and air passes between them with voicing. It does not occur in standard English.
How do you pronounce β?
Start to say /b/ but stop just before the lips meet. Critically, the teeth are never involved — that is what separates it from /v/.
Which languages have the voiced bilabial fricative?
Among the languages covered here: Spanish (lavar, “to wash”).
What is the difference between β and v?
English speakers use /v/, bringing the teeth to the lip. Spanish never does this.