Do Japanese actually pronounce the "v" sound?


Do Japanese actually pronounce the "v" sound? They do have a kana character
(ヴ) dedicated to transcribing foreign "v" sounds, but do they actually
pronounce them like the English phoneme /v/ (using the upper teeth and the
lower lip)? Or is it like a "weak" /b/ in Spanish, which is actually [/β/
(using both lips)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voiced_bilabial_fricative)?




I think on _reading_ ヴァ, ヴィ, etc., people usually try to pronounce it
differently from バ, ビ, etc., but with varying success. In fact, I think most
Japanese that try to distinguish ヴァ and バ pronounce what would be //v// indeed
like the Spanish [[β]], a voiced bilabial fricative (or like a combination
like [[bβ]]). That seems to make sense since the voiceless bilabial fricative
[[ɸ]] is already present in Japanese (in フ [[ɸɯ]] and as ファ, フィ, etc. in
loanwords).

I think one should point out, though, that while the katakana ヴ exists and is
gaining ground, there is no particular standard of spelling words with ヴ and
one will most often encounter the spelling with バ etc. and only rarely
encounter the spelling with ヴ. Loanwords that were loaned a long time ago are
usually much more resistant to respelling. For example, バージョン is rarely
spelled ヴァージョン:

> [BCCWJ](http://www.ninjal.ac.jp/english/products/bccwj/) corpus, accessible
> via <http://www.kotonoha.gr.jp/shonagon/>
>
> バージョン 1366 results  
>  ヴァージョン 107 results

Major monolingual dictionaries, such as 大辞林, in fact still don't use ヴ at all
and just note:

>
> [**ヴ**](https://kotobank.jp/word/%E3%83%B4-208607#E5.A4.A7.E8.BE.9E.E6.9E.97.20.E7.AC.AC.E4.B8.89.E7.89.88)
>
> 外来語の［v］の音を書き表すのに用いられる片仮名表記。
> 〔本辞典では「ヴァ」「ヴィ」「ヴ」「ヴェ」「ヴォ」の表記は用いず，原則としてバ行の片仮名を用いた。「ヴァージン→バージン」「ヴィオラ→ビオラ」「ヴント→ブント」「ヴェール→ベール」「ヴォリューム→ボリューム」。なお「ワイマール」「ウィーン」のように「ワ」「ウ」を用いたものもある〕

That is, ヴ is taken to be a particular katakana notation to indicate that a
loanword was spelled with V. 大辞林 writes all loanwords containing V (e.g.
ヴァージン, ヴィオラ, etc.) with バビブベボ (like バージン, ビオラ, etc.).

## tl;dr

In any case, I think it can be said that the //v// phoneme doesn't (yet) exist
in Japanese and for those speakers that do recognize it as different from
//b//, it's almost never the voiced labiodental fricative [[v]], but rather
the voiced bilabial fricative [[β]].

