A voiceless bilabial plosive or stop is a type of consonantal sound used in most spoken languages. It is familiar to English-speakers as the "p" sound in "spit". The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents this sound is .
Features of a voiceless bilabial plosive:
Research has shown that incidental learning positively impacts the acquisition of the /p/ sound for Arabic speakers and other EFL learners. This is particularly interesting given that the stop is missing from about 10% of languages that have a . (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. It is found in other areas as well; for example, Fijian, Onge, and many Papuan languages have but no .
Nonetheless, the sound is very common cross-linguistically. Most languages have at least a plain , and some distinguish more than one variety. Many Indo-Aryan languages, such as Hindustani, have a two-way contrast between the aspirated and the plain (also transcribed as in extensions to the IPA).