Voiceless bilabial plosive

Features of a voiceless bilabial plosive:

• Its manner of articulation is occlusive, which means it is produced by obstructing airflow in the vocal tract. Since the consonant is also oral, with no nasal outlet, the airflow is blocked entirely, and the consonant is a plosive.
• Its place of articulation is bilabial, which means it is articulated with both lips.
• Its phonation is voiceless, which means it is produced without vibrations of the vocal cords. In some languages the vocal cords are actively separated, so it is always voiceless; in others the cords are lax, so that it may take on the voicing of adjacent sounds.
• It is an oral consonant, which means that air is not allowed to escape through the nose.
• Because the sound is not produced with airflow over the tongue, the median–lateral dichotomy does not apply.
• Its airstream mechanism is pulmonic, which means it is articulated by pushing air only with the intercostal muscles and abdominal muscles, as in most sounds.

Research has shown that incidental learning positively impacts the acquisition of the /p/ sound for Arabic speakers and other EFL learners.^[1][2] This is particularly interesting given that the stop /p/ is missing from about 10% of languages that have a /b/. (See voiced velar stop for another such gap.) This is an areal feature of the circum-Saharan zone (Africa north of the equator plus the Arabian Peninsula). It is not known how old this areal feature is, and whether it might be a recent phenomenon due to Arabic as a prestige language, or whether Arabic was itself affected by a more ancient areal pattern.^[2] It is found in other areas as well; for example, Fijian, Onge, and many Papuan languages have /b/ but no /p/.

Nonetheless, the /p/ sound is very common cross-linguistically. Most languages have at least a plain /p/, and some distinguish more than one variety. Many Indo-Aryan languages, such as Hindustani, have a two-way contrast between the aspirated /pÊ°/ and the plain /p/ (also transcribed as [pË­] in extensions to the IPA).

• List of phonetics topics