Spanish Language Stack Exchange is a question and answer site for linguists, teachers, students and Spanish language enthusiasts in general wanting to discuss the finer points of the language. It only takes a minute to sign up.
Sign up to join this community
I have been taught that unlike in English, the -b and the -v are pronounced the same way in Spanish. They both sound like the -b in bat.
For example, "violeta, bola, vino, votar, botar" all start with the -b consonant.
But then I heard people pronouncing grapes as "u-vas" instead of "u-bas." Is this an exception to the rule?
The graphemes b and v correspond to one phoneme with two different allophones. If b/v appears in between two vowels (as in "uva") or preceded by a vowel and followed by a liquid (as in "hablar" or "abrir"), it is pronounced as bilabial fricative/approximant (you close your lips almost completely, so only a bit of air can escape; compare to English v, a labiodental, where the partial closure is done with the lower lip and the upper teeth); elsewhere, it is an occlusive, where the lips block air passage completely.
Normally the b and v sounds are equal in spanish. Maybe in some latin-american countries (Venezuela, maybe?) they are pronounced slightly differently, like in English, but you can pronounce them exactly the same with a /b/ sound. Actually, pronouncing them differently would sound strange in most (or all) spanish-speaking countries.
vosand they pronounce the V.