The voiced bilabial trill is a type of consonantal sound, used in some spoken languages. The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents the sound is ⟨ʙ⟩, a small capital version of the Latin letter b, and the equivalent X-SAMPA symbol is B\.

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Quick Facts ʙ, IPA Number ...

Voiced bilabial trill
ʙ
IPA Number	121
Audio sample
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Encoding
Entity (decimal)	ʙ
Unicode (hex)	U+0299
X-SAMPA	B\
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Features of the voiced bilabial trill:

• Its manner of articulation is trill, which means it is produced by directing air over an articulator so that it vibrates. In most instances, it is only found as the trilled release of a prenasalized stop.
• Its place of articulation is bilabial, which means it is articulated with both lips.
• Its phonation is voiced, which means the vocal cords vibrate during the articulation.
• It is an oral consonant, which means air is allowed to escape through the mouth only.
• Because the sound is not produced with airflow over the tongue, the central–lateral dichotomy does not apply.
• The airstream mechanism is pulmonic, which means it is articulated by pushing air solely with the intercostal muscles and abdominal muscles, as in most sounds.

The Knorkator song "[Buchstabe]" (the actual title is a glyph) on the 1999 album Hasenchartbreaker uses a similar sound (though linguolabial instead of bilabial) to replace "br" in a number of German words (e.g. [ˈʙaːtkaɐ̯tɔfəln] for Bratkartoffeln).

In many of the languages in which the bilabial trill occurs, it occurs only as part of a prenasalized bilabial stop with trilled release, [mbʙ]. That developed historically from a prenasalized stop before a relatively high back vowel like [mbu]. In such instances, the sounds are usually still limited to the environment of a following [u]. However, the trills in Mangbetu may precede any vowel and are sometimes preceded by only a nasal.

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