accent or rule?
in spain do they mix the b and v? because i heard el vino as el bino but i never hear viaje as biaje
3 Answers
Rule.
B and V is pronounced exactly the same everywhere.
Where it's not, it's being mispronounced. (And that does happen.)
That being said... they aren't quite pronounced the same as an English B. There is a buzzing of the lips that kinda sorta sounds like an English V sometimes. But the bottom lip never touches the top teeth, which is necessary to make an English V sound.
It's been said here at SpanishDict somewhere that if someone were to sneak in and switch every B in Spanish with a V, and every V with a B, that no pronunciation of any word would change a bit.
And you will also find that Spanish speakers who don't spell well will often mistakenly use one for the other. Because they truly sound the same.
Regional variations aside (especially in bilingual areas where the other language has the "v" sound), as Goyo explained, if you randomly changed all the v and b in a text, and asked an educated speaker to read it, it would have zero effect on the sound. Using on letter or the other makes no difference to the sound of the word.
However, people often ignore or neglect to say that these letters have two sounds, not one. After a pause, M or N, the sound is like in English, but in all other circumstances, the sound becomes much softer (the lips don't quite touch), and since this softer sound does not exist in English, it requires practice to be able to recognize it and pronounce it correctly. If the "normal" B sound is used where a softer one should be used, the result is too hard, like the typical exaggerated German or Russian pronunciation you hear in the movies when they try to speak English: it can be understood, but "Itt ssounndzz tooo hharrrd". The letter V follows exactly the same rules as the B, with both sounds.
The following spectrograms show the phrases "el viaje" and "un viaje", where the first V is soft and the second one (V after N) is "normal". Notice that while in the soft one there is a soft transition between L and V, in the second one there is a vertical wall caused by the occlusion with the lips.
I've asked an English speaker whether he can tell the different between the two V, and he can't see any at all. As I said, a lot of focused practice is necessary for a difference that for an English speaker's brain is not worth focusing on -the neural paths capable of making this differentiation were pruned by the age of 4, because they were not important to process English words. The same is true when we try to differentiate between an English B and an English V.
The b/v sound is probably the one with the greatest variation, even when listening to a single native speaker saying the same word.
