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Dental, alveolar and postalveolar trills

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IPA number
  
122

Unicode (hex)
  
U+0072

Kirshenbaum
  
r

Entity (decimal)
  
r

X-SAMPA
  
r

Dental, alveolar and postalveolar trills

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 commonly called the rolled R, rolling R, or trilled 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 ⟨r⟩ is the letter used in the orthographies of these languages.

Contents

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 Albanian, Spanish, Cypriot Greek, and a number of Armenian and Portuguese dialects, which treat them as distinct phonemes, and American English, which instead treats the tap as allophonic with the alveolar plosives.

People with ankyloglossia may find it exceptionally difficult to articulate this consonant due to the limited mobility of their tongues.

Voiced alveolar trill

Most commonly, the alveolar trill is voiced.

Features

Features of the alveolar trill:

  • Its manner of articulation is trill, which means it is produced by directing air over the articulator so that it vibrates.
  • Its place of articulation is dental, alveolar or post-alveolar, which means it is articulated behind upper front teeth, at the alveolar ridge or behind the alveolar ridge. It is most often apical, which means that it is pronounced with the tip of the tongue.
  • Its phonation is voiced, which means the vocal cords vibrate during the articulation.
  • It is an oral consonant, which means air is allowed to escape through the mouth only.
  • It is a central consonant, which means it is produced by directing the airstream along the center of the tongue, rather than to the sides.
  • The airstream mechanism is pulmonic, which means it is articulated by pushing air solely with the lungs and diaphragm, as in most sounds.

    • Voiced alveolar fricative trill

    In Czech, there are two contrasting alveolar trills. Besides the typical apical trill, written r, there is another, laminal trill, written ř, in words such as rybáři [ˈrɪbaːr̝ɪ] 'fishermen' and the common surname Dvořák. Its manner of articulation is similar to [r] but is laminal and the body of the tongue is raised. It is thus partially fricative, with the frication sounding rather like [ʒ] but not so retracted. It sounds like a simultaneous [r] and [ʒ], and non-native speakers may pronounce it as [rʐ] or [rʒ]. In the IPA, it is typically written as ⟨r⟩ plus the raising diacritic, ⟨r̝⟩, but it has also been written as laminal ⟨r̻⟩. (Before the 1989 IPA Kiel Convention, it had a dedicated symbol ⟨ɼ⟩). The Kobon language of Papua New Guinea also has a fricative trill, but the degree of frication is variable.

    Features

    Features of the voiced alveolar fricative trill:

  • Its manner of articulation is fricative trill, which means it is a non-sibilant fricative and a trill pronounced simultaneously.
  • Its place of articulation is laminal alveolar, which means it is articulated with the blade of the tongue at the alveolar ridge,
  • Its phonation is voiced, which means the vocal cords vibrate during the articulation.
  • It is an oral consonant, which means air is allowed to escape through the mouth only.
  • It is a central consonant, which means it is produced by directing the airstream along the center of the tongue, rather than to the sides.
  • The airstream mechanism is pulmonic, which means it is articulated by pushing air solely with the lungs and diaphragm, as in most sounds.

    • References

    Dental, alveolar and postalveolar trills Wikipedia
    (Text) CC BY-SA