Guttural R
It is also frequent in Flanders, eastern Austria, Yiddish (and hence Ashkenazi Hebrew), Luxembourgish, and among all French and some German speakers in Switzerland.
[2] Molière's Le Bourgeois gentilhomme, published in 1670, has a professor describe the sound of /r/ as an alveolar trill (Act II, Scene IV).
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.
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 [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 [ʀ] is now dominant in Portugal.
[4] The dialect of the fishermen of Setúbal used the voiced uvular fricative [ʁ] for all instances of "r" – word start, intervocalic, postconsonantal and syllable ending.
Some speakers use a guttural fricative instead of a trill, like the majority of Brazilians, but continue to use the flap [ɾ] before consonants (e.g. in quarto) and between vowels (e.g. in caro).
In areas where ⟨r⟩ 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.
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: perejil).
rotacismo), but the so-called r moscia ('limp' or 'lifeless r', an umbrella term for realizations of /r/ considered defective), which is sometimes uvular, is quite common in areas of Northwest Italy, i.e. Aosta Valley, Piedmont, Liguria, Lombardy and Emilia-Romagna.
[citation needed] Breton, spoken in Brittany (France), is a Celtic rather than Romance language, but is heavily influenced by French.
In the Dutch Low Saxon area there are several cities which have the uvular rhotic: Zutphen, Steenwijk,[12] Kampen,[13] Zwolle[14] and Deventer.
The alveolar pronunciation [r ~ 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.
Yiddish, the traditional language of Ashkenazi Jews in central and eastern Europe, is derived from Middle High German.
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".
[18][19][20] However, it is no longer used by most contemporary speakers, who generally realize /r/ as an alveolar approximant, [ɹʷ], in common with other varieties spoken in the English-speaking world.
Where they occur, they affect the succeeding alveolars, turning the clusters /rs/ and /rt/, /rd/, /rn/, /rl/ retroflex: [ʂ ʈ ɖ ɳ ɭ].
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.
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.
In Icelandic, the uvular rhotic-like [ʀ] or [ʁ][26] is an uncommon[26] deviation from the normal alveolar trill or flap, and is considered a speech disorder.
[citation needed] However, the uvular trill is common among the languages of the Sorbian minority in Saxony, eastern Germany, likely due to German influence.
In most forms of Hebrew, the classical pronunciation of rêš (ר) was a flapped [ɾ], and was grammatically treated as an ungeminable phoneme of the language.
[citation needed] 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.
Standard Malay words with voiced velar fricative (ɣ), such as loghat (dialect) and ghaib (invisible, mystical) are mostly Arabic loanwords spelled in their origin language with the letter غ in the Jawi alphabet.
Other Austronesian languages with similar features are: Standard Basque uses a trill for /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.
[10] Whereas standard Khmer uses an alveolar trill for /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.
