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In phonetics, an r-colored vowel or rhotacized vowel is a vowel either with the tip or blade of the tongue turned up during at least part of the articulation of the vowel (a retroflex articulation) or with the tip of the tongue down and the back of the tongue bunched. Both articulations produce basically the same auditory effect, a lowering in frequency of the third formant. In English, only some rhotic accents like General American contain r-colored vowels. They are rarely attested in other languages, but do occur in some (non-standard) varieties of Dutch.
In Mandarin Chinese, the rhotacized ending of some words is the prime way by which to distinguish speakers of Beijing dialect from those of other forms of Mandarin. In words ending in a nasal, the final consonant is displaced by the -r sound. In simplified written Chinese, the change is indicated with the suffix 儿.
In the 1930s the Dravidian language Badaga had two degrees of rhotacization among all five of its vowels, but few speakers maintain the distinction today, and then only in one or two vowels. An example is non-rhotic mouth, slightly rhotacized ("half retroflexed") bangle, and fully rhotacized ("fully retroflexed") crop.
The r-colored vowels of General American are sometimes written differently depending on whether they are stressed ( as in bird) or reduced ( as in dinner).
R-colored schwa
The r-colored schwa or schwer is a type of rhotacized vowel sound, used in some spoken languages. The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents this sound is , and the equivalent X-SAMPA symbol is *. In English, this vowel sound occurs in rhotic accents in words like better and meter.
In singing
Most vocalists who would normally speak English with r-colored vowels will suppress them at the ends of words while singing in English. Exceptions include many Irish singers, as well as Céline Dion (a native speaker of Quebec French; her English pronunciation may be a case of hypercorrection).
See also
"R-colored vowel"