Guttural R


Guttural R is the phenomenon whereby a rhotic consonant is produced in the back of the vocal tract 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 to be alternative pronunciations of the same phoneme, 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 and are 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, and among all French- and some German speakers in Switzerland and also in eastern Austria, including Vienna. German speakers who use the frontal-R now mainly live in the Alps or close by.
Outside of central Europe, it also occurs as the normal pronunciation of one of two rhotic phonemes 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.

Romance languages

French

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 during the end of the 18th century. Molière's Le Bourgeois gentilhomme, published in 1670, has a professor describe the sound of as an alveolar trill. It has since evolved, in Paris, to a voiced uvular fricative or approximant.
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 a 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.

Portuguese

Standard versions of Portuguese have two rhotic phonemes, which contrast only between vowels. In older Portuguese, these were the alveolar flap and the alveolar trill . In other positions, only 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 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. Many northern dialects, like Transmontano, Portuese, 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 is now dominant in Portugal.
A common realization of the word-initial in the Lisbon accent is a voiced uvular fricative trill.
The dialect of the fishermen of Setúbal used the voiced uvular fricative 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, 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, voiceless uvular fricative or a voiceless glottal fricative. 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. The resulting distribution can be described as:
In the three southernmost states, however, the alveolar trill 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 before consonants and between vowels. Among others, this includes many speakers in the city of São Paulo and some neighboring cities, though an alveolar approximant 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 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 but pronounce it lightly in some other words ending in . This tendency also occurs in some African countries; but speakers in Rio often resist the tendency, pronouncing a strong fricative or 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, which is normally voiced to. For example, a speaker whose sounds like will often pronounce surdo "deaf" as or even, with a very slight epenthetic vowel that mimics the preceding vowel.

Spanish

In most Spanish-speaking territories and regions, guttural or uvular realizations of are considered a speech defect. Generally the single flap, 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 are widespread in rural Puerto Rican Spanish and in the variety of Ponce, whereas they are heavily stigmatized in the variety of the capital. To a lesser extent, velar variants of are found in some rural Cuban and Dominican vernaculars
In the Basque-speaking areas of Spain, the uvular articulation has a higher prevalence among bilinguals than among Spanish monolinguals.

Italian

Guttural realization of is mostly considered a speech defect in Italian, but the so-called r moscia which is sometimes uvular is quite common in some northern areas, such as Piedmont, Lombardy and Emilia Romagna.

Occitan

As with all other Romance languages, the alveolar trill is the original way to pronounce the letter r in Occitan, as it was in Latin. Nowadays, the uvular trill and the voiced uvular fricative or approximant are common in some Occitan dialects. 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, 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,.

Continental West Germanic

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. 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.
The Frisian languages usually retain an alveolar rhotic.

Dutch and Afrikaans

In modern Dutch, quite a few different rhotic sounds are used. In Flanders, the usual rhotic is an alveolar trill, but the uvular rhotic 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 Noord-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 uvular rhotic is also used in some major cities outside of the Randstad area, such as Zwolle, Deventer. 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.

Standard German

Although the first standardized pronunciation dictionary by Theodor Siebs prescribed an alveolar pronunciation, most varieties of Standard German are now spoken with a uvular rhotic, usually a fricative or approximant, rather than a trill. The alveolar pronunciation is used in some standard German varieties of German-speaking Europe, now especially in the south. The sound remains more common in classical singing on the one hand, and in non-standard varieties on the other. Chiefly in Central German, however, 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 typically vocalized to,, or a simple lengthening. This is most common in the syllable coda, as in non-rhotic English, but often occurs before an underlying schwa, too. Vocalization of "r" is rare only in Alemannic and Swabian German.

Yiddish

The distinction between uvular versus alveolar R in high and low German speech varieties also historically influenced the development of upper and lower dialects of Yiddish, the historic vernacular language of Ashkenazi Jews. As these Jews migrated to Eastern Europe, they brought their particular pronunciations with them.

Insular West Germanic

English

Speakers of the traditional English dialect of Northumberland and northern County Durham use a uvular rhotic, known as the "Northumbrian Burr". However, it is no longer used by most contemporary speakers, who generally realize as an alveolar approximant,, in common with other varieties spoken in the English-speaking world.
The Hiberno-English of northeastern Leinster in Ireland also uses a uvular.

North Germanic

rhotics predominate in northern Scandinavia. Where they occur, they affect the succeeding alveolars, turning the clusters and,,, retroflex:. Thus the Norwegian word "norsk" is pronounced by speakers with an alveolar flap. This effect is rare in the speech of those using a uvular R.

Danish and Swedish

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 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 and in Västergötland the realization is commonly voiced.
Common from the time of Gustav III, 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 didn't have a speech defect, was Anders Gernandt, a popular equitation commentator on TV.

Norwegian

Most of Norway uses an alveolar flap, but about one third of the inhabitants of Norway are now using the uvular rhotic. In the western and southern part of South Norway, however, the uvular rhotic is still spreading. The origin was the city of Bergen. Because retroflex consonants are mutations of and other alveolar or dental consonants, the use of a uvular rhotic means an absence of most retroflex consonants.

Icelandic

While the use of an alveolar trill or flap is generalized among speakers of Icelandic, a uvular rhotic is a fairly common pronunciation variant in the language, although it is usually frowned upon as defective pronunciation and compared to stammering and other similar speech disorders.

Slavic languages

In Slavic languages, the alveolar trill predominates, with the use of guttural rhotics seen as defective pronunciation. One notable exception is the majority dialect of Sofia, Bulgaria, in which the uvular trill is used fairly consistently. The uvular trill is also 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.

Semitic languages

Hebrew

In Hebrew, the classical pronunciation associated with the consonant ר rêš was tapped, and was grammatically treated as an ungeminable phoneme of the language. In most dialects of Hebrew among the Jewish diaspora, it remained a tap or a trill. However, in some Ashkenazi dialects as preserved among Jews in northern Europe it was a uvular rhotic, either a trill or a fricative. This was because many native dialects of Yiddish were spoken that way, and their liturgical Hebrew carried the same pronunciation. Some Iraqi Jews also pronounce rêš as a guttural, 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 depending on circumstances.

Yiddish influence

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. 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 unique uvular approximant, specifically., which also exists in Yiddish.
The alveolar rhotic is still used today in some formal occasions, just as radio news broadcasts, and in the past was widely used in television and singing.

Israeli Hebrew

Many Jewish immigrants to Israel spoke a variety of Arabic in their countries of origin and pronounced the Hebrew rhotic as an alveolar tap, similar to Arabic ر rāʾ. Gradually, many of them began pronouncing their Hebrew rhotic as a voiced uvular fricative, a sound similar or identical to Arabic غ ġayn. However, in modern Sephardic and Mizrahi poetry and folk music an alveolar rhotic continues to be used.

Arabic

While most dialects of Arabic retain the classical pronunciation of ر rāʾ as an alveolar trill or tap, a few dialects use a uvular trill. These include:
The uvular 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. Moreover, Mosul-Arabic has commonly the voiced alveolar trill in numbers instead of a uvular fricative. Although this guttural rhotic is rare in Arabic, uvular and velar sounds are common in this language. The uvular/velar fricative ~ is a common standard pronunciation of the letter غ ġayn, and the uvular plosive is a standard pronunciation of the letter qāf ق.

Ethiopic

In Amharic the alveolar trill is the usual pronunciation of. 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. Also in Gafat a uvular fricative or trill might have existed.

Akkadian

The majority of Assyriologists deem an alveolar trill or tap the most likely pronunciation of Akkadian /r/ in most dialects. However, there are several indications to a velar or uvular fricative ~ particularly supported by John Huehnergard. The main arguments constitute alternations with the voiceless uvular fricative . Besides shows certain phonological parallelisms with and other gutturals.

Austronesian

Malay dialects

Guttural R exists among several Malay dialects. While standard Malay commonly uses coronal r, the guttural fricative are more prominently used in many dialects in Peninsular Malaysia and East Malaysia as well as some parts in Sumatra and East Kalimantan. These dialects include:
~ Perak Malay and Kedah Malay are the most notable.
These dialects mainly uses guttural fricative on both /r/ and /gh/. Standard Malay includes both coronal r and voiced guttural fricative /gh/ as two different phonemes. To denotes the guttural r in the dialects, letter "r" often replaced by "gh" or "q" in informal writings. Standard Malay words with voiced velar fricative, such as loghat and ghaib are mostly Arabic loanwords spelled with letter غ.

Other Austronesian languages

Other Austronesian languages with similar features are:

[|Basque]

uses a trill for , 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, go young speakers of Lapurdian and Low Navarrese are uvularizing the tap as well, thus neutralizing both rhotics.

Khmer

Whereas standard Khmer uses an alveolar trill for, 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.

Bantu

originally used an alveolar trill, which has shifted to uvular in modern times.

Rhotic-agnostic guttural consonants written as rhotics

There are languages where certain indigenous guttural consonants came to be written with means used in other languages to represent rhotics, thereby giving the superficial appearance of a guttural R that may have never actually functioned as a true rhotic consonant.

Inuit languages

The Inuit languages Greenlandic and Inuktitut either orthographize or transliterate their voiced uvular obstruent as. In Greenlandic, this phoneme is, while in Inuktitut it is. This spelling was convenient because these languages do not have non-lateral liquid consonants, and guttural realizations of are common in various languages, particularly the colonial languages Danish and French. But the Alaskan Inupiat language writes its phoneme instead as, reserving for its retroflex phoneme, which Greenlandic and Inuktitut do not have.

Works cited

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