Alveolar trill

The alveolar trill is a type of consonantal sound, used in some spoken languages. The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents dental, alveolar, and postalveolar trills is [r], and the equivalent X-SAMPA symbol is r. It is informally and commonly called the rolling R or rolled R. Quite often, /r/ is used in phonemic transcriptions (especially those found in dictionaries) of languages like English and German that have rhotic consonants that are not an alveolar trill. This is partly due to ease of typesetting and partly because is often the symbol used for the orthographies of such languages.

In the majority of Indo-European languages, this sound is at least occasionally allophonic with an alveolar tap [ɾ], particularly in unstressed positions. Exceptions to this include Spanish, Portuguese and Albanian, which treat them as separate phonemes.

Features

Features of the alveolar trill:

Its manner of articulation is trill, which means it is produced by vibrations of the tongue against the place of articulation.
Its place of articulation is alveolar which means it is articulated with the tip of the tongue against the alveolar ridge.
Its phonation type is voiced, which means the vocal cords are vibrating during the articulation.
It is an oral consonant, which means air is allowed to escape through the mouth.
It is a central consonant, which means it is produced by allowing the airstream to flow over the middle of the tongue, rather than the sides.
The airstream mechanism is pulmonic egressive, which means it is articulated by pushing air out of the lungs and through the vocal tract, rather than from the glottis or the mouth.

Occurrence

Language		Word	IPA	Meaning	Notes
Abkhaz		ашəара	[aʃʷara]	'measure'	See Abkhaz phonology
Afrikaans		rooi	[rɔɪ]	'red'
Albanian		rrush	[ruʃ]	'grape'
Arabic		رأس	[rɑʔs]	'head'	represented by a <ر>. See Arabic phonology
Basque		errota	[eˈrota]	'mill'
Catalan		esborrar	[əsbuˈra]	'to delete'	See Catalan phonology
Croatian		tri		'three'	May be syllabic.
Czech		chlor		'chlorine'	May be syllabic. See Czech phonology
Dutch		rood	[roːt]	'red'	Standard pronunciation. Pronunciation of 'r' varies regionally, see Dutch phonology
English	Scottish Dialect	curd		'curd'	See English phonology
Finnish		purra		'to bite'	See Finnish phonology
French	southern France and Corsica	rouge		'red'	See Standard and Quebec French phonologies.
French	rural Quebec	rouge		'red'	See Standard and Quebec French phonologies.
German	southern dialects	''Robe		'robe'	See German phonology
Greek		νερό	[ne̞ˈro̞]	'water'	See Modern Greek phonology
Hindi		घर		'house'	See Hindi-Urdu phonology
Hungarian		erdő		'forest'	See Hungarian phonology
Italian		terra		'earth'	See Italian phonology
Ngwe	Njoagwi dialect			'eye'
Polish		krok		'step'	See Polish phonology
Portuguese		carro		'car'	In some dialects. See Portuguese phonology and Guttural R.
Romanian		măr	[mər]	'apple'	See Romanian phonology
Russian		играть		'to play'	Retracted. See Russian phonology
Serbian		рт/rt		'cape'	May be syllabic
Slovak		ryba	[riba]	'fish'	May be syllabic
Spanish		perro	[ˈpɛro̞]	'dog'	See Spanish phonology
Tajik		арра	[ʌrrʌ]	'saw'
Ubykh		[bəqˁʼərda]		'to roll around'
Welsh		Rhagfyr	[ˈr̥aːgvɨr]	'December'

Raised alveolar non-sonorant trill

There is a phone (different from [r]) which is exclusively used in Czech (in words such as rybáři 'fishermen'). Its manner of articulation is similar but the tongue is raised; it is partially fricative. It is orthographically represented by the letter ř, and in IPA as . The basic manner of pronunciation is voiced but there is also a voiceless allophone [r̝̊].

References

Bibliography