Voiceless 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 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.

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, and a number of Armenian and Portuguese dialects, which treat them as completely separate phonemes.

People with ankyloglossia may find it exceptionally difficult to articulate this consonant due to the limited mobility of their tongues.^[1][2]

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 alveolar, which means it is articulated with either the tip or the blade of the tongue at the alveolar ridge, termed respectively apical and laminal.
• 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.

Occurrence

Voiceless alveolar trill

Some languages possess a voiceless alveolar trill, which differs only in the vibrations of the vocal cord. This is rare, and usually occurs alongside the voiced version as a similar phoneme or an allophone. It is postulated to have occurred in Ancient Greek, where it was spelled ⟨ῥ⟩; this sound has since merged with /r/ in Modern Greek.

Occurrence

Raised alveolar non-sonorant trill

In Czech there are two contrasting alveolar trills. Besides the typical trill, written r, there is another, written ř, in words such as rybáři [ˈrɪbaːr̝ɪ] 'fishermen' and the common surname Dvořák. Its manner of articulation is similar to [r] but the tongue is raised; it is partially fricative, with the frication sounding rather like [ʒ], though not so retracted. Thus in the IPA it is written as ⟨r⟩ plus the raising diacritic, ⟨r̝⟩. (Before the 1989 IPA Kiel Convention, it had a dedicated symbol ⟨ɼ⟩). It is normally voiced, but there is a voiceless allophone [r̝̊] as with many other Czech consonants. The Kobon language of Papua New Guinea also has a fricative trill, although the degree of frication is variable.

Occurrence

See also

• Index of phonetics articles

References

Bibliography