alveolar trill

IPA – number	122
IPA – text	r
IPA – image
Entity	r
X-SAMPA	r
Kirshenbaum	r<trl>
Sound sample?

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, this symbol 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 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

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 <r̝>. The basic manner of pronunciation is voiced but there is also a voiceless allophone [r̝˚].

See also

• List of phonetic topics

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