pronounced as /notice/Guttural R is the phenomenon whereby a rhotic consonant (an "R-like" sound) is produced in the back of the vocal tract (usually with the uvula) rather than in the front portion thereof and thus as a guttural consonant. Speakers of languages with guttural R typically regard guttural and coronal rhotics (throat-back-R and tongue-tip-R) to be alternative pronunciations of the same phoneme (conceptual sound), despite articulatory differences. Similar consonants are found in other parts of the world, but they often have little to no cultural association or interchangeability with coronal rhotics (such as pronounced as /link/, pronounced as /link/, and pronounced as /link/) and are (perhaps) not rhotics at all.
The guttural realization of a lone rhotic consonant is typical in most of what is now France, French-speaking Belgium, most of Germany, large parts of the Netherlands, Denmark, the southern parts of Sweden and southwestern parts of Norway. It is also frequent in Flanders, eastern Austria, Yiddish (and hence Ashkenazi Hebrew), Luxembourgish, and among all French and some German speakers in Switzerland.
Outside of central Europe, it also occurs as the normal pronunciation of one of two rhotic phonemes (usually replacing an older alveolar trill) in standard European Portuguese and in other parts of Portugal, particularly the Azores, various parts of Brazil, among minorities of other Portuguese-speaking regions, and in parts of Puerto Rico, Cuba and the Dominican Republic.
The r letter in French was historically pronounced as a trill, as was the case in Latin and as is still the case in Italian and Spanish. In Northern France, including Paris, the alveolar trill was gradually replaced with the uvular trill from the end of the 17th century.[1] Molière's Le Bourgeois gentilhomme, published in 1670, has a professor describe the sound of pronounced as //r// as an alveolar trill (Act II, Scene IV).[2] It has since evolved, in Paris, to a voiced uvular fricative or approximant pronounced as /[ʁ]/.
The alveolar trill was still the common sound of r in Southern France and in Quebec at the beginning of the 20th century, having been gradually replaced since then, due to Parisian influence, by the uvular pronunciation. The alveolar trill is now mostly associated, even in Southern France and in Quebec, with older speakers and rural settings.
The alveolar trill is still used in French singing in classical choral and opera. It is also used in other French speaking countries as well as on French oversea territories such as French Polynesia due to the influence of the indigenous languages which use the trill.
Standard versions of Portuguese have two rhotic phonemes, which contrast only between vowels. In older Portuguese, these were the alveolar flap pronounced as //ɾ// (written (r)) and the alveolar trill pronounced as //r// (written (rr)). In other positions, only (r) is written in Modern Portuguese, but it can stand for either sound, depending on the exact position. The distribution of these sounds is mostly the same as in other Iberian languages, i.e.:
In the 19th century, the uvular trill pronounced as /[ʀ]/ penetrated the upper classes in the region of Lisbon in Portugal as the realization of the alveolar trill. By the 20th century, it had replaced the alveolar trill in most of the country's urban areas and started to give way to the voiced uvular fricative pronounced as /[ʁ]/. Many northern dialects, like Transmontano, Portuese (which is heard in parts of Aveiro), Minhoto, and much of Beirão retain the alveolar trill. In the rural regions, the alveolar trill is still present, but because most of the country's population currently lives in or near the cities and owing to the mass media, the guttural pronounced as /[ʀ]/ is now dominant in Portugal.
A common realization of the word-initial pronounced as //ʀ// in the Lisbon accent is a voiced uvular fricative trill pronounced as /link/.
The dialect of the fishermen of Setúbal used the voiced uvular fricative pronounced as /[ʁ]/ for all instances of "r" – word start, intervocalic, postconsonantal and syllable ending. This same pronunciation is attested in people with rhotacism, in a new developing variety of young people in São Tomean Portuguese (Bouchard, 2017), and in non-native speakers of French or German origin.
In Africa, the classical alveolar trill is mostly still dominant, due to separate development from European Portuguese.
In Brazil, the normal pronunciation of is voiceless, either as a voiceless velar fricative pronounced as /[x]/, voiceless uvular fricative pronounced as /[χ]/ or a voiceless glottal fricative pronounced as /[h]/.[3] In many dialects, this voiceless sound not only replaces all occurrences of the traditional trill, but is also used for all that is not followed by a vowel (i.e. when at the end of a syllable, which uses a flap in other dialects). The resulting distribution can be described as:
In the three southernmost states, however, the alveolar trill pronounced as /[r]/ remains frequent, and the distribution of trill and flap is as in Portugal. Some speakers use a guttural fricative instead of a trill, like the majority of Brazilians, but continue to use the flap pronounced as /[ɾ]/ before consonants (e.g. in quarto) and between vowels (e.g. in caro). Among others, this includes many speakers in the city of São Paulo and some neighboring cities, though an alveolar approximant pronounced as /[ɹ]/ is also common, not only in the city, but the approximant is the dominant articulation in the São Paulo state, outside the capital, the most populous state in Brazil. The caipira dialect has the alveolar approximant pronounced as /[ɹ]/ in the same position.
In areas where at the end of a word would be a voiceless fricative, the tendency in colloquial speech is to pronounce this sound very lightly, or omit it entirely. Some speakers may omit it entirely in verb infinitives (amar "to love", comer "to eat", dormir "to sleep") but pronounce it lightly in some other words ending in (mar "sea", mulher "woman", amor "love"). Speakers in Rio often resist this tendency, pronouncing a strong fricative pronounced as /[x]/ or pronounced as /[χ]/ at the end of such words.
The voiceless fricative may be partly or fully voiced if it occurs directly before a voiced sound, especially in its weakest form of pronounced as /[h]/, which is normally voiced to pronounced as /[ɦ]/. For example, a speaker whose (rr) sounds like pronounced as /[h]/ will often pronounce surdo "deaf" as pronounced as /[ˈsuɦdu]/ or even pronounced as /[ˈsuɦʊdu]/, with a short epenthetic vowel that mimics the preceding vowel.
In most Spanish-speaking territories and regions, guttural or uvular realizations of pronounced as //r// are considered a speech defect. Generally the single flap pronounced as /[ɾ]/, spelled r as in cara, undergoes no defective pronunciations, but the alveolar trill in rata or perro is one of the last sounds learned by children and uvularization is likely among individuals who fail to achieve the alveolar articulation. This said, back variants for pronounced as //r// (pronounced as /[ʀ]/, pronounced as /[x]/ or pronounced as /[χ]/) are widespread in rural Puerto Rican Spanish and in the dialect of Ponce,[4] whereas they are heavily stigmatized in the dialect of the capital.[5] To a lesser extent, velar variants of pronounced as //r// are found in some rural Cuban (Yateras, Guantánamo Province)[6] and Dominican vernaculars (Cibao, eastern rural regions of the country)[7] In the 1937 Parsley Massacre, Dominican troops attacked Haitians in Cibao and the northwestern border. The popular name of the massacre comes from the shibboleth applied to distinguish Dominicans from Haitians: the suspects were ordered to name some parsley (Spanish; Castilian: link=no|perejil). If they used a French or Haitian Creole pronunciation for Spanish; Castilian: r or Spanish; Castilian: j, they would be executed.
In the Basque-speaking areas of Spain, the uvular articulation pronounced as /[ʁ]/ has a higher prevalence among bilinguals than among Spanish monolinguals.
Guttural realization of pronounced as //r// is mostly considered a speech defect in Italian (cf. rotacismo), but the so-called r moscia ('limp' or 'lifeless r, an umbrella term for realizations of pronounced as //r// considered defective), which is sometimes uvular, is quite common in some northern areas, such as Aosta Valley, Piedmont, Liguria, Lombardy and Emilia-Romagna.[8]
As with all other Romance languages, the alveolar trill pronounced as //r// is the original way to pronounce the letter r in Occitan, as it was in Latin. Nowadays, the uvular trill pronounced as /[ʀ]/ and the Voiced uvular fricative or approximant pronounced as /[ʁ]/ are common in some Occitan dialects (Provence, Auvergne, Alps, Limousin). The dialects of Languedoc and Gascony also have these realizations, but it is generally considered to be influence from French and therefore rejected from the standard versions of these dialects.
Breton, spoken in Brittany (France), is a Celtic rather than Romance language, but is heavily influenced by French. It retains an alveolar trill in some dialects, like in Léon and Morbihan, but most dialects now have the same rhotic as French, pronounced as /[ʁ]/.
The uvular rhotic is most common in Central German dialects and in Standard German. Many Low Franconian, Low Saxon, and Upper German varieties have also adopted it with others maintaining the alveolar trill (pronounced as /[r]/). The development of uvular rhotics in these regions is not entirely understood, but a common theory is that these languages have done so because of French influence, though the reason for uvular rhotics in modern European French itself is not well understood (see above).
The Frisian languages usually retain an alveolar rhotic.
In modern Dutch, quite a few different rhotic sounds are used. In Flanders, the usual rhotic is an alveolar trill, but the uvular rhotic pronounced as //ʁ// does occur, mostly in the province of Limburg, in Ghent and in Brussels. In the Netherlands, the uvular rhotic is the dominant rhotic in the southern provinces of North Brabant and Limburg, having become so in the early twentieth century. In the rest of the country, the situation is more complicated. The uvular rhotic is dominant in the western agglomeration Randstad, including cities like Rotterdam, The Hague and Utrecht (the dialect of Amsterdam conversely tends to use an alveolar rhotic, but the uvular is becoming increasingly common). The uvular rhotic is also used in some major cities such as Leeuwarden (Stadsfries). Outside of these uvular rhotic core areas, the alveolar trill is common. People learning Dutch as a foreign language also tend to use the alveolar trill because it contrasts better with the voiceless velar fricative pronounced as //x// in Dutch. The Afrikaans language of South Africa also uses an alveolar trill for its rhotic, except in the non-urban rural regions around Cape Town, chiefly in the town of Malmesbury, Western Cape, where it is uvular (called a bry). Some Afrikaans speakers from other areas also bry, either as a result of ancestry from the Malmesbury region or from difficulty pronouncing the alveolar trill.
In the Dutch Low Saxon area there are several cities which have the uvular rhotic: Zutphen, Steenwijk,[9] Kampen,[10] Zwolle[11] and Deventer.[12] In IJsselmuiden near Kampen the uvular r can also be heard.[13] In the countryside the alveolar trill is common.[14]
Although the first standardized pronunciation dictionary by Theodor Siebs prescribed an alveolar pronunciation, most varieties of German are now spoken with a uvular rhotic, usually a fricative or approximant pronounced as /link/, rather than a trill pronounced as /link/. The alveolar pronunciation pronounced as /[{{IPAplink|r}} ~ {{IPAplink|ɾ}}]/ continues to be considered acceptable in all Standard German varieties, but is most common in the south as well as the far North of German-speaking Europe. It also remains prevailing in classical singing and, to a lesser degree, in stage acting (see German: [[Bühnendeutsch]]).
In German dialects, the alveolar has survived somewhat more widely than in the standard language, though there are several regions, especially in Central German, where even the broadest rural dialects use a uvular R.
Regardless of whether a uvular or an alveolar pronunciation is used, German post-vocalic "r" is often vocalized to pronounced as /link/, pronounced as /link/, or a simple lengthening pronounced as /link/. This is most common in the syllable coda, as in non-rhotic English, but sometimes occurs before an underlying schwa, too. Vocalization of "r" is rare only in Alemannic (velar) and Swabian (uvular) German.
Yiddish, the traditional language of Ashkenazi Jews in central and eastern Europe, is derived from Middle High German. As such it presumably used the alveolar R at first, but the uvular R then became predominant in many Yiddish dialects. It is unclear whether this happened through independent developments or under influence from modern German (a language widely spoken in large parts of eastern Europe until 1945).
Speakers of the traditional English dialect of Northumberland and northern County Durham use a uvular rhotic, known as the "Northumbrian Burr".[15] [16] [17] However, it is no longer used by most contemporary speakers, who generally realize pronounced as //r// as an alveolar approximant, pronounced as /[ɹʷ]/, in common with other varieties spoken in the English-speaking world.[18] [19]
The Hiberno-English of northeastern Leinster in Ireland also uses a uvular pronounced as /[ʁ]/.[20]
Alveolar rhotics predominate in northern Scandinavia. Where they occur, they affect the succeeding alveolars, turning the clusters pronounced as //rs// and pronounced as //rt//, pronounced as //rd//, pronounced as //rn//, pronounced as //rl// retroflex: pronounced as /[ʂ ʈ ɖ ɳ ɭ]/. Thus the Norwegian word "norsk" is pronounced pronounced as /[nɔʂk]/ by speakers with an alveolar flap. This effect is rare in the speech of those using a uvular R (pronounced as /[nɔʁsk]/).
The rhotic used in Denmark is a voiced uvular approximant, and the nearby Swedish ex-Danish regions of Scania, Blekinge, southern Halland as well as a large part of Småland and on the Öland island, use a uvular trill or a uvular fricative.
To some extent in Östergötland and still quite commonly in Västergötland, a mixture of guttural and rolling rhotic consonants (e.g. pronounced as //ʁ// and pronounced as //r// is used, with the pronunciation depending on the position in the word, the stress of the syllable and in some varieties depending on whether the consonant is geminated. The pronunciation remains if a word that is pronounced with a particular rhotic consonant is put into a compound word in a position where that realization would not otherwise occur if it were part of the same stem as the preceding sound. However, in Östergötland the pronunciation tends to gravitate more towards pronounced as /[w]/ and in Västergötland the realization is commonly voiced.Common from the time of Gustav III (Swedish king 1771–1792), who was much inspired by French culture and language, was the use of guttural R in the nobility and in the upper classes of Stockholm. This phenomenon vanished in the 1900s. The last well-known non-Southerner who spoke with a guttural R, and did not have a speech defect, was Anders Gernandt, a popular equitation commentator on TV.
Most of Norway uses an alveolar flap, but about one third of the inhabitants of Norway, primarily in the South-West region, are now using the uvular rhotic. In the western and southern part of South Norway, the uvular rhotic is still spreading and includes all towns and coastal areas of Agder, most of Rogaland, large parts of Hordaland, and Sogn og Fjordane in and around Florø. The origin was the city of Bergen as well as Kristiansand in the 18th century.[21] [22] Because retroflex consonants are mutations of pronounced as /[ɾ]/ and other alveolar or dental consonants, the use of a uvular rhotic means an absence of most retroflex consonants.
In Icelandic, the uvular rhotic-like pronounced as /[ʀ]/ or pronounced as /[ʁ]/[23] is an uncommon[23] deviation from the normal alveolar trill or flap, and is considered a speech disorder.[24]
In Slavic languages, the alveolar trill predominates, with the use of guttural rhotics seen as defective pronunciation. However, the uvular trill is common among the languages of the Sorbian minority in Saxony, eastern Germany, likely due to German influence. The uvular rhotic may also be found in a small minority in Silesia and other German-influenced regions of Poland and also Slovenia, but is overall quite rare even in these regions. It can also be perceived as an ethnic marker of Jewishness, particularly in Russian where Eastern European Jews often carried the uvular rhotic from their native Yiddish into their pronunciation of Russian.
In Tannaitic Hebrew, Gimel (Hebrew: ג) allophonically alternated between [g] and pronounced as /link/.
In most forms of Hebrew, the classical pronunciation of (Hebrew: ר) was a flapped pronounced as /link/, and was grammatically treated as an ungeminable phoneme of the language. In most dialects of Hebrew among the Jewish diaspora, it remained a flap pronounced as /link/ or a trill pronounced as /link/. However, in some Ashkenazi dialects as preserved among Jews in northern Europe it was a uvular rhotic, either a trill pronounced as /link/ or a fricative pronounced as /link/. This was because many (but not all) native dialects of Yiddish were spoken that way, and their liturgical Hebrew carried the same pronunciation. Some Iraqi Jews also pronounce as a guttural pronounced as /link/, reflecting their dialect of Arabic.
An apparently unrelated uvular rhotic is believed to have appeared in the Tiberian vocalization of Hebrew, where it is believed to have coexisted with additional non-guttural, emphatic articulations of pronounced as //r// depending on circumstances.[25]
Although an Ashkenazi Jew in the Russian Empire, the Zionist Eliezer Ben-Yehuda based his Standard Hebrew on Sephardi Hebrew, originally spoken in Spain, and therefore recommended an alveolar pronounced as /link/. However, just like him, the first waves of Jews to resettle in the Holy Land were Ashkenazi, and Standard Hebrew would come to be spoken with their native pronunciation. Consequently, by now nearly all Israeli Jews pronounce the consonant rêš as a uvular approximant pronounced as /link/,[26] which also exists in Yiddish.[26]
The alveolar rhotic is still used today in some formal speech, such as radio news broadcasts, and in the past was widely used in television and singing.
Many Jewish immigrants to Israel spoke a variety of Arabic in their countries of origin and pronounced the Hebrew rhotic as an alveolar flap pronounced as /link/, similar to Arabic (Arabic: [[ر]]). Gradually, many of them began pronouncing their Hebrew rhotic as a voiced uvular fricative pronounced as /link/, a sound similar or (depending on the Arabic dialect) identical to Arabic (Arabic: [[غ]]). However, in modern Sephardic and Mizrahi poetry and folk music an alveolar rhotic continues to be used.
While most varieties of Arabic retain the classical pronunciation of (Arabic: [[ر]]) as an alveolar trill pronounced as /link/ or flap pronounced as /link/, a few varieties use a uvular trill pronounced as /link/. These include:
The uvular pronounced as //r// was attested already in vernacular Arabic of the Abbasid period. Nowadays Christian Arabic of Baghdad exhibits also an alveolar trill in very few lexemes, but primarily used in loanwords from Modern Standard Arabic. Native words with an alveolar trill are rare.[30] Moreover, Mosul Arabic commonly has the voiced alveolar trill instead of a uvular fricative in numbers (e.g. pronounced as //arbaʕiːn// "forty").[31] Although this guttural rhotic is rare in Arabic, uvular and velar sounds are common in this language. The uvular or velar fricative pronounced as /link/~pronounced as /link/ is a common standard pronunciation of the letter (Arabic: [[غ]]), and the uvular plosive pronounced as /link/ is a standard pronunciation of the letter (Arabic: [[ق]]).
In Amharic the alveolar trill pronounced as /link/ is the usual pronunciation of pronounced as //r//. But there are also assertions that around Addis Abeba some dialects exhibit a uvular r. Note that this information is not very well supported among Semitists.[32] Also in Gafat (extinct since the 1950s) a uvular fricative or trill might have existed.[33]
The majority of Assyriologists deem an alveolar trill or flap the most likely pronunciation of Akkadian pronounced as //r// in most dialects. However, there are several indications toward a velar or uvular fricative pronounced as /link/~pronounced as /link/ particularly supported by John Huehnergard.[34] The main arguments constitute alternations with the voiceless uvular fricative pronounced as //χ// (e.g. ruššû/ḫuššû "red"; barmātu "multicolored" (fem. pl.), the spelling ba-aḫ-ma-a-tù is attested).[35] Besides pronounced as //r// shows certain phonological parallelisms with pronounced as //χ// and other gutturals (especially the glottal stop pronounced as /link/).[36]
Guttural R exists among several Malay dialects. While standard Malay commonly uses coronal r (pronounced as /ink/,pronounced as /ink/,pronounced as /ink/), the guttural fricative (pronounced as /ink/~pronounced as /ink/) are more prominently used in many dialects in Peninsular Malaysia and East Malaysia as well as some parts of Sumatra and East Kalimantan. These dialects include:
~ Perak Malay and Kedah Malay are the most notable examples.
These dialects mainly use the guttural fricative (pronounced as /ink/~pronounced as /ink/) for both /r/ and /gh/. Standard Malay includes both coronal r (pronounced as /ink/,pronounced as /ink/,pronounced as /ink/) and voiced guttural fricative /gh/ (pronounced as /ink/~pronounced as /ink/) as two different phonemes. To denote the guttural r in the dialects, the letter "r" is often replaced by "gh" or "q" in informal writing . Standard Malay words with voiced velar fricative (pronounced as /ink/), such as loghat (dialect) and ghaib (invisible, mystical) are mostly Arabic loanwords spelled in their origin language with the letter Arabic: [[غ]] in the Jawi alphabet.
Other Austronesian languages with similar features are:
Standard Basque uses a trill for pronounced as //r// (written as r-, -rr-, -r), but most speakers of the Lapurdian and Low Navarrese dialects use a voiced uvular fricative as in French. In the Southern Basque Country, the uvular articulation is seen as a speech defect, but the prevalence is higher among bilinguals than among Spanish monolinguals. Recently, speakers of Lapurdian and Low Navarrese are uvularizing the tap (-r-) as well, thus neutralizing both rhotics.[37]
Whereas standard Khmer uses an alveolar trill for pronounced as //r//, the colloquial Phnom Penh dialect uses a uvular pronunciation for the phoneme, which may be elided and leave behind a residual tonal or register contrast.[38]
Sesotho originally used an alveolar trill pronounced as //r//, which has shifted to uvular pronounced as //ʀ// in modern times.
Hill-Maṛia (sometimes considered a dialect of Gondi) has a pronounced as //ʁ// corresponding to pronounced as //r// in other related languages or *t̠ from proto Dravidian.[39]
There are languages where certain indigenous guttural consonants came to be written with symbols used in other languages to represent rhotics, thereby giving the superficial appearance of a guttural R without actually functioning as true rhotic consonants.
The Inuit languages Greenlandic and Inuktitut either orthographize or transliterate their voiced uvular obstruent as . In Greenlandic, this phoneme is pronounced as /[ʁ]/, while in Inuktitut it is pronounced as /[ɢ]/. This spelling was convenient because these languages do not have non-lateral liquid consonants, and guttural realizations of (r) are common in various languages, particularly the colonial languages Danish and French. But the Alaskan Inupiat language writes its pronounced as /[ʁ]/ phoneme instead as (ġ), reserving (r) for its retroflex pronounced as /[ʐ]/ phoneme, which Greenlandic and Inuktitut do not have.