What’s in the r? A review of the usage of the r symbol in the Illustrations of the IPA

Abstract

What does the symbol r mean when it is used in a transcription? Here we analyze the use of the symbols for the alveolar trills (r) and taps ( ) among the Illustrations of the IPA since 1971. We begin by sketching the history of the various symbols and conventions used to represent the trill and the tap in two transcription traditions: the Americanist Transcription System and the International Phonetic Alphabet. From the 213 languages covered until 2021, we carefully analyze the 162 that have trills and/or taps, using the information provided in Illustrations. Our results show that r tends to be used to represent a generic ‘r-like’ sound in both transcription traditions. More precisely, by comparing the use of r in the consonant tables and in the transcriptions of their accompanying narrative texts, we show that r is not systematically associated with an alveolar trill. Furthermore, we show that phonetic trills are less frequent than phonetic taps, while phonemic trills are more frequent than phonemic taps. As a consequence, inferring the presence of trilling in a sound system from the presence of r in its transcription is not as straightforward as one might expect. These findings highlight the critical importance of being absolutely explicit about the meaning of the various symbols found in grammars and secondary databases, and of r in particular, as a preliminary step in a broad range of studies, including cross-linguistic comparisons, inferences about the past or generalizations about language acquisition and articulatory effort.

The alveolar trill is perceived as rough by speakers of different languages

“…The coding procedure was based on Anselme et al (2023) and used resources from large databases with phonemic and phonetic information on the languages spoken by our participants, especially PHOIBLE (Moran et al, 2014) and Glottolog (Hammarström et al, 2021). However, language-specific sources were consulted for each language separately, including recordings such as those available in the DoReCo corpus (Seifart et al, 2022).…”

“…These modulations may mimic the experience of touching a rough texture as opposed to a smooth one. However, Winter et al's (2022) conclusion that the r-for-rough pattern is specific to trills is called into question by recent work finding that precise phonetic realizations of rhotics have not always been accurately documented in the sound inventories of many languages (Anselme et al, 2023). Although /r/ technically symbolizes an alveolar trill according to the International Phonetic Alphabet, it is often used to represent a generic "r-like" sound, not reliably distinguishing whether it is typically realized as a trill or as a tap ([ɾ] in IPA).…”