Rhotic consonant
In phonetics, rhotic consonants, or "R-like" sounds, are liquid consonants that are traditionally represented orthographically by symbols derived from the Greek letter rho, including, in the Latin script and, in the Cyrillic script. They are transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet by upper- or lower-case variants of Roman, :, ,,,,,, and. Transcriptions for vocalic or semivocalic realisations of underlying rhotics include the and.
This class of sounds is difficult to characterise phonetically; from a phonetic standpoint, there is no single articulatory correlate common to rhotic consonants. Rhotics have instead been found to carry out similar phonological functions or to have certain similar phonological features across different languages.
Being "R-like" is an elusive and ambiguous concept phonetically and the same sounds that function as rhotics in some systems may pattern with fricatives, semivowels, or even stops. For example, the alveolar flap is a rhotic consonant in multiple languages, but in North American English, the alveolar tap is an allophone of the stop phoneme, as in water. It is likely that rhotics are not a phonetically natural class but a phonological class.
Some languages have rhotic and non-rhotic varieties, which differ in the incidence of rhotic consonants. In non-rhotic accents of English, is not pronounced unless it is followed directly by a vowel.
Types
The most typical rhotic sounds found in the world's languages are the following:- Trill : The airstream is interrupted several times as one of the organs of speech 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 'alveolar trill; the IPA symbol for this sound is. Most non-alveolar trills, such as the bilabial one, however, are not considered 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 and Welsh .
- *The uvular trill is another kind of rhotic trill; see below for more.
- Tap or flap : Similar to a trill, but involving just one brief interruption of airflow. In a number of languages flaps are used as reduced variants of trills, especially in fast speech. However, in Spanish, for example, flaps and trills contrast, as in pero versus perro . Also flaps are used as basic rhotics in Japanese and Korean languages. In Australian English and most American dialects of English, taps do not function as rhotics but are realizations of intervocalic apical stops. The IPA symbol for these sounds is .
- Alveolar or retroflex approximant : The front part of the tongue approaches the upper gum, or the tongue-tip is curled back towards the roof of the mouth. 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.
- Uvular : The back of the tongue approaches the soft palate or the uvula. The standard Rs in European Portuguese, French, German, Danish, and Modern Hebrew 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 were accents that once employed a uvular R, which was called the "Northumbrian burr".
- developmental non-rhotic Rs': Many non-rhotic British speakers have a labialization to of their Rs, which is between idiosyncratic and dialectal, and since it includes some RP speakers, somewhat prestigious. Apart from English, in all Brazilian Portuguese dialects the phoneme, or, may be actually realized as other, traditionally non-rhotic, fricatives, 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 allophones is rather long, or up to , the latter eight being particularly common, while none of them except archaic, that contrasts 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. Additionally, some other languages and variants, such as Haitian Creole and Timorese Portuguese, use velar and glottal fricatives instead of traditional rhotics, too. In Vietnamese, depending on dialect, the rhotic can occur as, or. In modern Mandarin Chinese, the phoneme, which is represented as in Hanyu Pinyin, resembles the rhotics in other languages in realization, thus it can be considered a rhotic consonant.
Characteristics
In broad transcription rhotics are usually symbolised as unless there are two or more types of rhotic in the same language; for example, most Australian Aboriginal languages, which contrast approximant and trill, use the symbols r and rr respectively. The IPA has a full set of different symbols which can be used whenever more phonetic precision is required: an r rotated 180° for the alveolar approximant, a small capital R for the uvular trill, and a flipped small capital R for the voiced uvular fricative or approximant.The fact that the sounds conventionally classified as "rhotics" vary greatly in both place and manner in terms of articulation, and also in their acoustic characteristics, has led several linguists to investigate what, if anything, they have in common that justifies grouping them together. One suggestion that has been made is that each member of the class of rhotics shares certain properties with other members of the class, but not necessarily the same properties with all; in this case, rhotics have a "family resemblance" with each other rather than a strict set of shared properties. Another suggestion is that rhotics are defined by their behaviour on the sonority hierarchy, namely, that a rhotic is any sound that patterns as being more sonorous than a lateral consonant but less sonorous than a vowel. The potential for variation within the class of rhotics makes them a popular area for research in sociolinguistics.
Rhotics and rhoticity in the world's languages
English
English has rhotic and non-rhotic accents. Rhotic speakers pronounce a historical in all instances, while non-rhotic speakers only pronounce at the beginning of a syllable.Dutch
Colloquial Northern Dutch speech of the Randstad region is variably rhotic. In the syllable coda, the sequences may be realized as, which may be close to or the same as the vowels or sequences, resulting in a variable merger. For instance, kerk 'church' and cake 'pound cake' may become homophonous as, whereas maar 'but' can be homophonous with maai ' mow' as. and are usually somewhat distinct from and as the former feature vowels that are more central.After, may be dropped altogether, as in kilometer 'kilometer'. This is commonly heard in The Hague. It is not necessarily restricted to the word-final position, as it can also happen in word-final clusters in words such as honderd 'hundred'.
After,,, and, may be realized as a centering glide, as in mier 'ant', muur 'wall', moer 'queen bee', meer 'lake' and deur 'door'. As with and, these vowels are more central than in other contexts. Furthermore, both and are raised in this context, so that meer becomes a near-homophone of mier, whereas deur becomes a quasi-rhyme of muur.
In citation forms, in the syllable coda is pronounced as a pharyngealized pre-velar bunched approximant that is acoustically similar to : etc. Other realizations are also possible, depending on the region and individual speaker, so that mier may be also pronounced or. The pre-velar bunched approximant as well as the palatal approximant realization of described above are virtually unknown in southern varieties of Dutch. In the varieties where they do occur, they are restricted to the syllable coda. In other environments, is realized as or.
Other Germanic languages
In most varieties of German, in the syllable coda is frequently realized as a vowel or a semivowel, or. In the traditional standard pronunciation, this happens only in the unstressed ending -er and after long vowels: for example besser, sehr. In common speech the vocalization is usual after short vowels as well, and additional contractions may occur: for example Dorn ~, hart ~. Commonplace mergers include that of with and loss of length distinctions before coda . Compare German phonology.Similarly, Danish after a vowel is, unless followed by a stressed vowel, either pronounced or merged with the preceding vowel while usually influencing its vowel quality .