Voiced alveolar trill

The voiced alveolar trill is a type of consonant. It is found in some spoken languages. It is usually called the rolled R, rolling R, or trilled R. The International Phonetic Alphabet letter for this sound is ⟨r⟩. The X-SAMPA symbol for this sound is r.

Alveolar trill
r
IPA number	122
Encoding
Entity (decimal)	r
Unicode (hex)	U+0072
X-SAMPA	r
Kirshenbaum	r<trl>
Sound

"Alveolar trill" redirects here. For the voiceless consonant, see Voiceless alveolar trill. For the raised consonant, see Raised alveolar non-sonorant trill.

Dictionaries of languages like English and German sometimes use the symbol ⟨r⟩. They have rhotic consonants that are not an alveolar trill. This is because typing the letter r is easier.

In many Indo-European languages, this sound is sometimes an allophone of the alveolar tap [ɾ]. This happens especially in unstressed syllables. Some languages like Catalan, Spanish, Albanian and some Portuguese treat these as two different sounds.

Features

• The airstream mechanism is pulmonic. This means that this sound is produced by pushing air solely with the lungs and diaphragm, as in most sounds.
• The phonation is voiced. This means that the vocal cords vibrate while the sound is being pronounced.
• The place of articulation (where the sound is produced) is alveolar. This means that this sound is produced with the tip of the tongue (apical) or the blade of the tongue at the alveolar ridge (laminal).
• The manner of articulation (how the sound is produced) is trill. This means that this sound is produced by directing air over the articulator so that it vibrates.

Examples

Language		Word	IPA	Meaning
Arabic		رأس	[rɑʔs]	'head'
Dutch		rood	[roːt]	'red'
English	Scottish	curd	[kʌrd]	'curd'
French	southern France and Corsica	rouge	[ruʒ]	'red'
German	some dialects	Schmarrn	[ʃmaːrn]	'nonsense'
Hindi		घर	[ɡʱər]	'house'
Italian		terra	[ˈtɛrra]	'earth'
Malay	Standard	arah	[arah]	'direction'
Russian		играть	[ɪˈɡr̠atʲ]	'to play'
Spanish		perro	[ˈpe̞ro̞]	'dog'