ALVEOLAR APPROXIMANT

The 'alveolar approximant' is a type of consonantal sound used in some spoken languages. The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents dental, alveolar, and postalveolar approximants is , and the equivalent X-SAMPA symbol is r. The IPA symbol is a turned lowercase letter ''r''.

Contents

Features

In English

In other languages

See also

Features

Features of the alveolar approximant:

★ Its manner of articulation is approximant, which means it is produced by bringing one articulator close to another but without the vocal tract being narrowed to such an extent that a turbulent airstream is produced.

★ Its place of articulation is alveolar, which means it is articulated with either the tip or the blade of the tongue against the alveolar ridge, termed respectively ''apical'' and ''laminal''.

★ Its phonation type is voiced, which means the vocal cords are vibrating during the articulation.

★ It is an oral consonant, which means air is allowed to escape through the mouth.

★ It is a central consonant, which means it is produced by allowing the airstream to flow over the middle of the tongue, rather than the sides.

★ The airstream mechanism is pulmonic egressive, which means it is articulated by pushing air out of the lungs and through the vocal tract, rather than from the glottis or the mouth.
Acoustically, // is characterized by compressed f1-f3, particularly because of its low f3 value. /Its low f3 values result from perturbations at three locations; rounded lips, alveolar constriction, and a constriction around the velum or pharynx. These constrictions cause perturbations at velocity maxima in the third harmonic of the voice signal, causing a sharp decrease in resonant frequency to below 1000 Hz.

In English

Most English dialects use this sound for the letter ''r'' and the digraph ''wr,'' though many speakers of these dialects have a retroflex rather than alveolar approximant. Originally the ''wr'' sound was labialized and the ''r'' sound was not, but the distinction has been lost from English, and now both ''r'' and ''wr'' are labialized at the start of a syllable, as in ''red'' .
Some phonemic transcriptions use the /r/ symbol instead of // for the 'r' sound for ease of typesetting, even though that technically represents the alveolar trill.

In other languages

The sound is rare among the world's languages. It can be found in Dutch, where it is becoming increasingly more common and accepted as an allophone of /r/ preceding consonants and at the end of a phrase. Also in Swedish, it is among the most common pronunciations of the /r/-phoneme, especially in the dialects spoken around the capital of Stockholm and on the island of Gotland, though it can be heard even in national broadcast media.
Only a few languages and dialects use the alveolar approximant as a regular phoneme:

★ Armenian: սուրչ , "coffee"

★ Caipira Portuguese: ''po'r'ta'' [], "door"

★ Chukchi ңи'р'эк , "two"

★ Dutch (some dialects, particularly in Holland): ''we'r'k'' , "work"

★ Faroese: 'r'óðu'r' / / , "rudder"

★ Sanskrit: संस्कृतम् saṃsk'ṛ'tam // "Sanskrit"
It is written "" in Devanāgarī and transcribed as "" and "" in IAST.

See also

★ List of phonetic topics

★ velarized alveolar approximant