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The alveolar trill is a type of consonantal sound, used in some spoken languages (such as Russian, Spanish, Armenian, and Polish). The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents dental, alveolar, and postalveolar trills is , and the equivalent X-SAMPA symbol is r. It is informally called the rolling R or rolled R.
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.
In English
Most dialects of English lack an alveolar trill. The most notable exception is the Scottish dialect. This particular sound is challenging to produce for people who do not have it in their native tongue.
Although not used in day-to-day language, a TV ad campaign in Canada for the Tim Hortons doughnut shop chain brought the sound to prominence with the expression "Roll up the rim to win", which used rolled R's to make the ad campaign more memorable. A similar ad appeared on American television for Ruffles brand potato chips with the slogan, "R-r-ruffles have r-r-ridges."
In other languages
Alveolar trills are common in Slavic languages like Russian and Polish, as well as Romance languages such as Spanish, Catalan, Occitan, Iberian Portuguese and Italian. It also figures prominently in Basque, one of Europe's last remaining original languages. Standard varieties of French and German, use the uvular trill instead, albeit allophonically. However, the alveolar trill exists in the Southern dialects of both of those languages. The trill is also found in colloquial and standard Arabic where it is represented by the letter ر. All Indo-European languages, including English and French, are believed to originally have featured this sound.
In some languages, e.g. Czech and Slovak, the alveolar trill can be syllabic , i.e. it can supply a vowel which forms a nucleus of a syllable as in Czech krk (neck). Syllabic can be also long in Slovak. The length is denoted by an acute /ŕ/, e.g. sŕna (roe-doe).
A voiceless version of this sound, , occurs in Welsh, and is written as rh. The voiceless alveolar trill also was most likely allophonic to its voiced counterpart in Ancient Greek.
Some Malayalam speakers pronounce both of their language's rhotics as trills. These people contrast a prealveolar (~ dental) and a postalveolar trill: vs. .
Notes on phonetic transcription
In English and German dictionaries, the symbol * is usually used to represent the alveolar or retroflex approximant in English (IPA symbols: and ) or the uvular trill in German (IPA symbol: ).
Raised alveolar non-sonorant trill
There is a phoneme (different from which is specific exclusively for the Czech language. 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 symbols * which is not an individual phoneme but an allophone. E.g. it is voiceless in the word rybář (fisherman) but it is voiced in rybáři (fishermen).
Unlike it is non-sonorant, i.e. [ cannot be a nucleus of a syllable.
See also
Alveolární vibranta | Stimmhafter alveolarer Vibrant | Consonne roulée alvéolaire voisée | Coireall còsagail | Vibrante múltipla alveolar | Consoană vibrantă alveolară | Alveolar tremulant | 齿龈颤音
"Alveolar trill"