The Spanish Pronunciation Guide

B-V phonetics

To V or not to V? That Is the Question.

A friend writes to us about a phonetic puzzlement:

One thing that has always puzzled me is the pronunciation of the letter v. All Spanish primers seem to be unanimous about the need to pronounce it as a soft b when the v comes at the beginning of a word. However, I have read wildly conflicting advice on how to pronounce when it falls in the middle of a word. Can you clarify this for me?

Can do, Sport. But first we must rid ourselves of some fuzzy terminology. What in the world, I ask you, is a "soft b"?... No, no, what we want here is SCIENCE, pal, not touchy-feely mumbo jumbo. Not to worry: when I get finished with this subject, you'll be an amateur phonetician and you'll talk just like Pancho Villa [and Pancho Billa, too]. (By the way, his real name was not Pancho but Doroteo, but nobody ever kidded him in this regard and lived to brag about it.)

Let's start by citing an authority on the matter: "El fonema /b/ se representa en la escritura por b o v: caballo, robo, libro, vida, servir, leve. Es un error todavía extendido suponer que estas dos letras responden, como en otros idiomas, a dos fonemas diferentes" (Manuel Seco, Diccionario de dudas y dificultades de la lengua española, 10ª edición revisada [Madrid: Espasa, 1998]).

So far, so good. Now let's look at where this leaves the English-speaking student of Spanish.

I. SOME TEDIOUS (BUT NECESSARY) PRELIMINARIES

Consider this sentence: "Vince's bizarre bathyscaphe obviously baffled Beverly."

A. You'll have noticed at once that only ONE phoneme in this sentence-the ph in "bathyscaphe" and the phonetically identical ff in "baffled"-is an UNVOICED LABIODENTAL FRICATIVE. That is, when you pronounce the f-sound (written as /f/ in phonetics) three things happen in your speech apparatus:

.your vocal cords remain still and thus do not produce resonant sound (UNVOICED)
.your lower lip vigorously approaches your upper front teeth (LABIODENTAL) but does not seal off the flow of air
.air is compressed and audibly expelled through the constriction thus formed (FRICATIVE)

The Spanish /f/ is produced in exactly the same way as the English one, although Spanish has only one corresponding grapheme, or letter, f, where English has two, f and ph.

B. You will also have noticed that the three v's in our model-in "Vince's," "obviously," and "Beverly"-are VOICED labiodental fricatives. That is, the v is articulated just like an f, except that your vocal cords vibrate, making a trace of resonant sound to go along with the constricted rush of air. In effect, an English f is phonetically nothing more than an unvoiced English v, or if you prefer, an English v is just a voiced English f.

C. Finally, the five b's in our model are all phonetically classified as VOICED BILABIAL OCCLUSIVE AFFRICATES. [The term "voiced plosives" will do just as well.] That is, when you say them your speech apparatus does this:

.your vocal cords move, making resonant sound (VOICED) [Should they fail to move, you'd instead get the phoneme /p/, making all the difference between bath and path, bill and pill, etc.]
. your lips close entirely, stopping the air flow behind them (BILABIAL OCCLUSIVE)
. your lips "pop" open, plosively, releasing the built-up air behind them (AFFRICATE)

II. b AND v: ENGLISH AND SPANISH COMPARED

Now that we've got our terminology straight, we can begin to sort out the nettlesome business of the Spanish b and v. Keep the following points in mind:

A. The b and v in English are completely different, as we have just seen. Both are voiced, but the first is bilabial; the second is labiodental.

B. The only labiodental phoneme in Spanish is the unvoiced /f/. In standard universal Spanish, the v is emphatically NOT a labiodental-in straight talk, this means leave your teeth alone.

C. In Spanish, the b and the v are phonetically IDENTICAL. Repeat, IDENTICAL. They are BOTH voiced bilabials. (Lips only, Bubba.)

D. When defacing public property, some graffitists have a tough time determining, in writing, when it's a b when it's a v. Thus, we sometimes find scrawled on a garage door in East L.A., or on a neighborhood storefront in Detroit or Chicago, a message like:

Biva mi varrio [for "Viva mi barrio"],

which offers ample evidence that

1) such vandals haven't Clue One about the orthography of their own language and probably could not care less about it; and
2) their confusion, in written Spanish, arises from the fact that Spanish has TWO graphemes-b and v-for representing only ONE phoneme. (Surely you didn't find anything too odd about the phonetically identical ff and ph in our English example above. So you can't very well protest that there's something odd about the phonetically identical b and v in Spanish, right?)

III. BOTTOM LINE

Remember only this: The graphemes b and v are avsolutely, positibely IDENTICAL IN SPANISH PRONUNCIATION, no matter where they occur. Period. No exceptions. No funny stuff. But you will hear increasing phonetic differentiation between b (always a bilabial) and v (incorrectly, as a labiodental) the closer you get to certain bilingual populations, for example, along the U.S.-Mexico border, simply as a matter of phonetic cross-pollination, because the b and the v on the English-speaking side are bery different, as pointed out already avobe (or, if you prefer, "above"). And gibben the sheer inbasive force of the English language all obber the world, I predict that this differentiation is likely to increase measuravly obber time. The mere existence of such special cases of phonetic interference in Spanish does not, however, make it correct for the rest of the 400 million speakers of Spanish worldwide.

Still with me? Are you sure there's no part of the concept of "IDENTICAL" you still don't understand?

Good.

IV. CRUCIAL FINE POINTS OF b AND v in SPANISH PRONUNCIATION

Now we must consider WHERE the b and the v can occur in Spanish, i.e., either between vowels or at the beginning of a breath group or emphatically marked syllable.

A. If a b or a v occurs BETWEEN VOWELS, you have a totally new phoneme, entirely unfamiliar to speakers of English.

What is it? It's a VOICED BILABIAL FRICATIVE.

How do you make one? Your lips start to close and almost touch, but continuously flowing air keeps them from closing altogether. Try this exercise: place the eraser-end of a pencil, or just the tip of your little finger, against your front teeth and say the name "Bob." Observe that your lips do NOT touch, because they CANNOT touch, owing to the interfering object. To an English-speaker's ear, the result, phonologically, sounds much more like a w-but without (repeat, WITHOUT) the "lip-puckering" associated with the English w-than either an English b or an English v. I repeat: ENGLISH HAS NO SUCH PHONEME, in which the unflexed lips do not quite touch while the phoneme is being voiced. You have to pay very close attention to a native speaker's lips to see how this phoneme is produced, inasmuch as your English-speaking ear is not trained to "hear" this entirely foreign sound. (Cf. the Japanese confusion of r and l, in English, or the Arabic speaker's confusion of b and p, in Spanish. Without some training, they just can't "hear" the differences because their own respective languages do not require them to notice them as having any influence on meaning.)

Examples (no lip-closing now, and no teeth on the v's-use the pencil eraser, or your finger):

ella vive en Ávila = e / lla / (w)i / (w)ee / nÁ / (w)i / la
me llevó a la verdad = me / lle / (w)óa / la / (w)er / dad
un abanico bonito = u / na / (w)a / ni / co / (w)o / ni / to
la vida de Barcelona = la / (w)i / da / de / (w)ar / ce / lo / na
esto va por avión = es / to / (w)a / po / ra / (w)ión
Ana va a votar = A / na / (w)aa / (w)o / tar
Ana va a botar = A / na / (w)aa / (w)o / tar
Esteban cantaba = Es / te / (w)an / can / ta / (w)a

B. If either a b or a v occurs at the BEGINNING of a syllable or breath group, is it IDENTICAL to the English bilabial b, as in "Bill," "Bob," or "'I believe I'll blow that bathyscaphe to bits,' said Beverly." This is a relatively clear, sharp, plosive sound, both in Spanish and in English. The airflow is momentarily interrupted by the closed lips and then released.

Examples:

embalé el baúl = em / ba / léel / ba / úl
por ver = slow: por / ber, or fast: por / (w)er
palabra = slow: pa / la / bra, or fast: pa / la / (w)ra
la bruja = la / bru / ja,
los vascos = los / bas / cos
Vigo = Bi / go
Virginia = Bir / gi / nia
invidente = in / bi / den / te

(There's a lot to say about consonant clusters like the one in the example, just above, in which you have a phonetic back-formation in "invidente," which makes the pronunciation sound more like "IM / bi / den / te"-but we'll save that for another day.)

C. Note, too, that in the same word beginning with b or v, the corresponding phonemes will shift from BILABIAL PLOSIVES, when they're initial, to BILABIAL FRICATIVES when they occur in other vocalic environments.

Examples:

Bien. > Muy bien. [In the second example the lips do NOT entirely close on the b.]
Voy. > Ya voy. [Exactly the same deal here: the first example sounds almost exactly like the English word "boy," only the "shape" of the vowels is slightly different in Spanish. The second example, sounds like "ya / (w)oi"]
¡Vale! > ¡No vale! [= Ba / le > No / (w)a / le]
Bernardo no viene. > ¿Viene Bernardo?
Bien. > Todo va bien.
Bailo. > Yo bailo bien.

You get the idea.

V. THE LAST WORD

While you're learning to master the above, just remember this: there is no such thing in standard universal Spanish pronunciation, anywhere in the Hispanic world, as a VOICED fricative labiodental, only the UNVOICED fricative labiodental /f/, identical to that of English.

All clear now?