The Phoneme /v/ in Spoken Literary Slovene

The phoneme /v/ has the most allophones of any phoneme in the Slovene literary language. Joze Toporisic defines this phoneme as a sonorant [v] with three consonantal allophones: voiced, voiceless, & semivocalic; bilabial variants preceding a consonant in slow speech also have a syllabic variant (ie, vocalic [u]). Tatjana Srebot-Rejec, however, based on acoustic measurements, defines the voiced & voiceless variants as vocalic; in word-initial position followed by liquids [r] & [l], she recommends a labio-dental pronunciation. Pronunciation in initial position followed by liquids & pronunciation of the preposition v 'in' continue to pose an orthoepic problem. 23 References. Adapted from the source document