Rhotic Consonant - Types

Types

The most typical rhotic sounds found in the world's languages are the following:

• Trill (popularly known as rolled r): The airstream is interrupted several times as one of the organs of speech (usually the tip of the tongue or the uvula) vibrates, closing and opening the air passage. If a trill is made with the tip of the tongue against the upper gum, it is called an apical (tongue-tip) alveolar trill; the IPA symbol for this sound is . Most non-alveolar trills, such as the bilabial one, however, are not considered a rhotic.
  • Many languages, such as Bulgarian, Swedish, Norwegian, Frisian, Italian, Spanish, Russian, Polish, Ukrainian, Dutch and most Occitan variants, use trilled rhotics. In the English-speaking world, the stereotyped Scottish rolled is well known. The "stage pronunciation" of German specifies the alveolar trill for clarity. Rare kinds of trills include Czech ⟨ř⟩ (fricative trill) and Welsh ⟨rh⟩ (voiceless trill).

• Tap or flap (these terms describe very similar articulations): Similar to a trill, but involving just one brief interruption of airflow. In many languages taps are used as reduced variants of trills, especially in fast speech. However, in Spanish, for example, taps and trills contrast, as in pero /ˈpeɾo/ ("but") versus perro /ˈpero/ ("dog"). Also flaps are used as basic rhotics in Japanese and Korean languages, although frequently varying between a central flap and a lateral flap . In some English dialects, such as American and Australian, flaps do not function as rhotics but are realizations of intervocalic apical stops (/t/ and /d/, as in rider and butter). The IPA symbol for this sound is .

• Alveolar or retroflex approximant (as in most accents of English—with minute differences): The front part of the tongue approaches the upper gum, or the tongue-tip is curled back towards the roof of the mouth ("retroflexion"). No or little friction can be heard, and there is no momentary closure of the vocal tract. The IPA symbol for the alveolar approximant is and the symbol for the retroflex approximant is . There is a distinction between an unrounded retroflex approximant and a rounded variety that probably could have been found in Anglo-Saxon and even to this day in some dialects of English, where the orthographic key is r for the unrounded version and usually wr for the rounded version (these dialects will make a differentiation between right and write). Also used as a rhotic in some dialects of Armenian, Dutch, German, Brazilian Portuguese (depending on phonotactics) and Swedish.

• Uvular (popularly called guttural r): The back of the tongue approaches the soft palate or the uvula. The standard ars in Portuguese, French, German, Hebrew, and Danish are variants of this rhotic. If fricative, the sound is often impressionistically described as harsh or grating. This includes the voiced uvular fricative, voiceless uvular fricative, and uvular trill. In northern England, there used to be accents that employed an uvular ar, which was called a "burr".

• developmental non-rhotic ars (often called lisps): Many non-rhotic British speakers have a labialization to of their ars, which is between idosyncratic and dialectal (southern and southwestern England), and since it includes some RP speakers, somewhat prestigious. Apart of English, in all Brazilian Portuguese dialects the ⟨rr⟩ phoneme, or /ʁ/, may be actually realized as other, traditionally non-rhotic, fricatives (and most often is so), unless it occurs single between vowels, being so realized as a dental, alveolar, postalveolar or retroflex flap. In the syllable coda, it varies individually as a fricative, a flap or an approximant, though fricatives are ubiquitous in the Northern and Northeastern regions and all states of Southeastern Brazil but São Paulo and surrounding areas. The total inventory of /ʁ/ allophones is rather long, or up to, the latter eight being particularly common, while none of them except archaic, that contrast with the flap in all positions, may occur alone in a given dialect. Few dialects, such as sulista and fluminense, give preference to voiced allophones; elsewhere, they are common only as coda, before voiced consonants. Aditionally, some other languages and variants, such as Haitian Creole and Timorese Portuguese use velar and glottal fricatives instead of traditional rhotics, too.