Va: The Labial Semivowel

Va is the twenty-ninth consonant of the varnamala, the last of the four semivowels, and the partner of the labial vowel u. Its pronunciation across the subcontinent ranges between a sound made with the lower lip against the upper teeth and one made with both lips, closer to an English w, and the two are not distinguished either in the script or in the classical phonetic descriptions, which treat it as a single labial semivowel. Which realisation a speaker uses depends on region and on the neighbouring sounds, and neither is more correct than the other by the tradition's own account. Its written form is close to that of the voiced labial stop, which is why manuscripts confuse the two and why critical editions have to decide between them on grounds of sense.

Under the sandhi rules the vowel u becomes this letter whenever a dissimilar vowel follows, exactly as i becomes the palatal semivowel, so a written text carries it at joins where the separated words had a vowel. That conversion is one of the most frequently applied rules in the language and is among the first a learner has to be able to reverse. The variation between the two realisations is not random, and speakers follow regular habits about where each is used, but those habits differ from region to region and neither the script nor the classical phonetic descriptions record them. The consequence is that this is one of the few things about reading Devanagari that has to be learned by ear rather than read off the page.