Talk:Alveolar trill

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Listening to the attached wav, it sounds to me like a computer speaking the word "lamp-post"! Am I hearing right? Where does the word "lamp post" have any "r" or Alveolar Trill sound? Nyh 15:14, 31 Aug 2004 (UTC)

After listening to it some more, I figured out that the computer might be actually saying "repulse". But the repeating of this word over and over without any waits interestingly lets you hear it differently... In any case, it would have been much better if the voice was human, speaking slowly, with obvious beginning and end and pauses before and after the speach. Nyh 15:14, 31 Aug 2004 (UTC)

The recording is of renowned phonetician Peter Ladefoged producing the alveolar trill sound between two vowels, in this case [a]. Nohat 04:48, 23 Oct 2004 (UTC)

It's strange and intriguing reading all these stories of people struggling to produce a rolled R. I am a native welsh-speaker, and as such have great difficulty NOT pronouncing it, even when speaking English. I can pronounce a 'soft' R, albeit with difficulty, but in some words/situations it becomes impossible. For example the word 'throb'. Also, I read of how repeating the phrase 'pot of tea' over and over could help, and I have another suggestion: In the chorus to the Red Hot Chili Peppers song 'Give it away', a trilled or rolled R can be heard fairly clearly.- Why not try and imitate this?? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 88.109.88.172 (talk) 22:40, 4 April 2008 (UTC)

Contents

[edit] Learning to produce it

I shall love forever whomever writes a section about learning how to produce an alveolar trill. In two years of intensive practice, I have developped the hability to produce an alveolar flap. In two more years, perhaps...? --[[User:Valmi|Valmi ✒]] 21:17, 29 Oct 2004 (UTC)

I'd also like to know how to pronounce an alveolar trill. Since I'm an American, I know how to pronounce an alveolar flap, so I know where to position my tongue. I just can't find any thorough information on how to trill. --/ɛvɪs/ 14:44, Mar 20, 2005 (UTC)
I third that notion, I want to be able to make the cool noise! 67.160.39.151 30 June 2005 23:54 (UTC)
It took me six years of middle- and high-school Spanish to learn how to make the sound, and then I still had trouble in certain environments. I don't know if that makes me especially well qualified, or completely unqualified to teach other people, but I'll give it a shot. Remember, this is what I think would work for me, but everyone learns a little differently. Maybe other people could add other approaches?

"

I was born in Italy, and people roll all their R's (not just some as in Spanish), but I've still been unable to pronounce a decent rolled R until a few years ago (I'm 22 - say until 4 or 5 years ago). Like you, I still can only pronunce it easily in certain situations; in others I have to make quite an efforts, and there are words where I can't fluently roll an R no matter how much effort.
Oh, and learning how to trill didn't eventually come as something natural... I had to train myself for it. LjL 17:02, 21 July 2005 (UTC)
Okay, first the flap. (There are different types of taps and flaps (if you read that article); you've probably noticed that the Spanish and English taps don't sound all that similar.) Place the tip of your tongue against the alveolar ridge (the place where the roof of your mouth bulges out a little, just above your gum line, before it slopes up to your palate)—or perhaps better, curl your tongue a little so that you touch with the underside of the tip. Now say d, but blow at the same time, so that your tongue flicks out from behind your teeth. (You don't blow when pronouncing a flap normally, of course, but this should give you a feeling for how your tongue should move.) Now try the same thing, but with a vowel like ah after (then before and after) the flap. Repeat, making the contact with your tongue and mouth gradually faster and gentler, and reducing your breath until you're not blowing at all, but your tongue is still flicking out from behind your teeth.
Once you're comfortable with that, can say a ra ra ra ra ra with very gentle contact between tongue and mouth, and aren't blowing at all: now start blowing again, probably harder this time, and hold your tongue in position at the alveolar ridge but still very gently. It's a bit like playing a flute: blow too hard and nothing happens, too soft and nothing happens, wrong tension in your lips, and nothing happens. With a trill, you'll need to play around with how hard you blow, and how much tension you put in your tongue. When we get frustrated, we tend to put more force into things, but that's self defeating. You need to keep your tongue loose so it can vibrate.
You only need it to vibrate twice! Most of the time, in most languages around the world, the tongue only makes 2 or 3 strikes when pronouncing a trill. Literally, one strike is a flap/tap, two is a trill.* That's all you need. But like holding a note with a flute for only a second at first, you can gradually extend it as you become comfortable with it, until you can trill as long as you have air in your lungs. (Actually, that's a good excercise: by trying to keep up the trill when you're running out of air, you learn to make it with less air flow, which will sound more natural. You only need lots of air when you're first learning how.)
This of course will make an apical (tongue-tip) trill. There's another kind, which some of you may find easier. (Learn whichever is easier first, because it's not hard to switch over once you've got the basic idea down.) That's a laminal (tongue-blade) trill. Instead of curling the tongue up so that the tip (or underside of the tip) touches the alveolar ridge, lie it flat, so that the top surface of the tongue, in the very front, makes contact from the alveolar ridge to the back side of the teeth. For me, it helps if I pull my lips back, as if I were saying 'cheese' for the camera. This makes a slightly different sound (a little higher pitched, maybe?), but may be easier for some of you.
For all of this, your jaw should be slack (or at least not tense). That's why I suggested using the vowel ah. Your jaw doesn't need to move at all. a ra ra ra, a rra rra rra, it should just be your tongue that moves. (It's okay if your jaw does move a little, especially if it helps, but I don't think you should try to make the flap or trill by using your jaw. If you find you have to move your jaw, try using the vowel e or o instead of a.)
Once you can make a trill with ah, try it with other vowels. It's easier if all the vowels are the same: e rre rre, i rri rri, o rro rro, u rru rru. Don't try mixing them up until you feel you've got it down with all the vowels separately.
Now, for the longest time after I learned how to make a trill, and could get it between most vowel combinations (i rra is still a bit difficult), I couldn't say the name Enrique for the life of me. In the Mexican Spanish I'm used to, that ar is rolled. Maybe just twice, but it's not a simple flap. The trick I found was that there's a very very faint fricative between the en and the ar, at least in the native Spanish speaker I imitated, so that the name was almost Enðrique. Very brief, so it almost disappears (really an approximant rather than a true fricative), but just enough existence to separate the en and ar: [en.ðri.ke] (or perhaps [en.ðri.ke]. For some of you, it might be easier to syllabify it differently, as [e.nri.ke], instead of using the eth (ð) (can you say nr at the beginning of a syllable or word?), but I imagine the little eth will help more of you.
Does any of this help at all? —kwami 2005 July 1 03:26 (UTC)
*This is a simplification, and close enough for most purposes. But trills are very often also pronounced with a single contact. There are two differences between trills and taps: trills vary in the number of contacts, whereas taps do not; and taps are made as a contraction of the tongue, whereas trills are left to 'flap in the breeze', so to speak.
Well, I can trill somewhat now. A speaker of a language/dialect with trills in it would probably think it sounds a bit weak, but I guess this is a start. --/ɛvɪs/ /tɑːk/ /kɑntɹɪbjuʃənz/ July 1, 2005 18:05 (UTC)
dont know if this will help anyone, but in order to produce a trilled sound with the tongue one needs a much greater amount of air flow (air pressure) than for any sound in American English varieties. so, this will feel very unusual for many people. futhermore, since the Spanish /r/ (which is what many want to produce) is a voiced sound, it is takes a little bit more air pressure from the lungs to produce and maintain a trill. compared to the uvular trill, the alveolar trill may be harder for many because the tongue has more mass than the uvula & is thus harder to vibrate. so perhaps, one may keep in mind that it will seem like it takes much more effort to make an alveolar, but this is normal & it will probably feel more & more natural as you practice. happy languaging! – ishwar  (speak) 03:29, 2005 July 22 (UTC)
It's weird, though, I have more difficulty pronouncing a voiceless /r/ than a voiced one. Perhaps it's just 'cause I've trained myself to pronounce the voiced version only. The Spanish and the Italian /r/'s are, for all I can tell, the same (the flap technically isn't found in Italian, which uses a trill all the time, but in reality, every Italian speaker I'm aquainted with uses the flap in almost every single "r" situation, and the trill for "rr" only); I could listen to some sound files and tell "how right" the various trills sound, if anyone thinks this would be of any help. Note that I definitely can tell if an /r/ is pronounced correctly for Italian, even though I have problems pronouncing it myself.
At one point, I used to be able to pronounce an uvular but not an alveolar; now, though, while I can pronounce both, the alveolar one comes out easier than the uvular. LjL 16:53, 22 July 2005 (UTC)

I'm learning Russian and all of the r's are trilled :( All of my friends can make the sound but I can't, only 2 weeks on though, so I hope!!!!

Russian has two trills, the apical-alveolar one and the palatalized one. I never had problems with the palatalized one: it's the automatic outcome when I put my tongue into the palatalized position and try to say "R" (which is, by default, the uvular trill for me). The alveolar one was much harder to learn, see below.
David Marjanović | david.marjanovic_at_gmx.at | 00:15 CET-summertime | 2006/4/2

Interesting. All this reminds me strongly of my experience of learning alveolar trills – even though I have a trill, the uvular one, in my mother tongue (German). For years, even the 4 years when I had Russian in school, I thought what turned out to be the apical alveolar trill was articulated behind my own (which I didn't know to be uvular; after all, the entire oral cavity and the air in it vibrates, and there isn't any other uvular sound in my kind of German). Outcome? Yet another uvular trill with a lot of added pharyngeal tension or something. Never sounded right. Ô surprise. Only last autumn (5 1/2 years after school...!) did I hear enough Spanish to find out that I had been pulling in the wrong direction. This came as quite a surprise to me; I used to believe I'm very good at imitating sounds from hearing, and I have successfully and quickly learned exotic phenomena like the Pinyin x (hint: it is not [ɕ], even though almost everyone transcribes it that way). As you can guess from my surname, I had been infrequently but regularly been exposed to the Serbocroatian apical-alveolar [f]-tinged trill for basically all of my life. (Sounds best with tightly clenched teeth! ;-) )

Today I use a lot of tongue and jaw (!) muscles to keep the position and shape of my tongue for getting alveolar trills right. I can't explain most of this stuff, and most of it is definitely completely unnecessary, so I probably can't help any of you by giving written advice. I can only offer giving audio examples over Skype. :-)

BTW, something important needs to be worked into the article. There are (at least) two different alveolar trills, the apical one (Slavic languages, Spanish, apparently Arabic, Swiss German, arguably some Styrian dialect of German as well...; tongue straight) and the laminal one (Italian, Finnish, apparently lots of others; tongue arched so that the tip touches the lower teeth – if you try that one with a straight tongue, you won't be able to pronounce anything but [i] behind it!). They sound pretty different. I guess the entire continuum between these extremes occurs in different languages...

David Marjanović | david.marjanovic_at_gmx.at | 00:42 CET-summertime | 2006/4/2

David, are you sure about the laminals? It seems incredible that you could keep the tip of your tongue behind your bottom teeth, even if you started out that way. And I seem to remember that all coronal trills involve the tip of the tongue by necessity, even if they're not exactly apical. kwami 01:49, 2 April 2006 (UTC)
Sorry!!! In the laminal trill, the tip of the tongue touches the lower alveoli, not the lower teeth. Otherwise it would sound like a garbled [θ]!
However, the tip of the tongue does not vibrate in the laminal trill and, I think, hardly in the apical one either (where it is behind the lower alveoli and doesn't touch them). The place where the business happens is the front or blade or something – the part opposite of the upper alveoli –, not the tip.
~:-|
Yeah, I think I'm right, and "apical trill" is a misnomer... but don't quite take my word for it.
David Marjanović | david.marjanovic_at_gmx.at | 14:06 CET-summertime | 2006/4/2
just say rrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr! in the article hehehe!-F3rn4nd0 08:24, 27 October 2006 (UTC)
My imagination, or is this a particularly difficult sound to learn for foreign speakers? Besides English/French, I've learned Spanish, and attempted Mandarin, and am learning German at the moment, all during or after adolescence; and I've had no trouble with any of the stranger phonemes - all the approximants in Spanish, the two "ch" sounds in German, even those odd consonants in Mandarin like Pinyin X and Q and R and so on - but this thing, which I want to learn to produce before I start learning Russian (and to improve my Spanish) is very difficult, and I've yet to be able to pronounce it convincingly in more than a few words - the russian word "прялка" being the best, and even then, (1) I always take a deep breath before pronouncing it properly, for some reason, and (2) I'll be damned if I know whether I'm palatising it or not, not to mention whether it should be, since it doesn't have the ь or ы (it's just a test word, not something I've looked up. I assume it means "little prayer"?). It seems harder when followed by certain sounds; my tongue just sits there and it turns into some kind of frankenstein fricative that I don't want. —Preceding unsigned comment added by PheonixSong (talk • contribs) 13:25, 28 September 2007 (UTC)

My language uses alveolar trill (Czech) and until about 24 didn't even realize that my pronounciation was wrong - I used what's called "velar" variant (not sure if it's exactly the same as uvular, "velar" is from lat. velum - soft palate). I set to learn the proper alveloar trill and with help of a logopaedist I succeeded - but it wasn't easy at all. The induction is easiest with consonant groups "tr", "dr", "pr" and "br" so it is what you propably should start with. At first you will be able to approximate trill with single tap (which is equivalent with single cycle of the trill and sounds almost indistinguishable from normal trill in normal speech). After lot of training your tongue's dexterity increases to to the point the tip of your tongue actually makes two or more trills. The point is then to be able to do it reliably at any position. That takes lot of training. I used to find "-ir" groups particularly difficult. After few weeks I could reliably trill my tongue at will for any length of time and I claimed success. So, it can certainly be done, but it takes quite an effort. And if you don't succeed, there's no need to despair - there's great number of Czech speakers who can't pronounce alveolar trill and use uvular/velar variants instead. And I know one acquaintance who tried repeatedly to learn proper trill and failed every time. I guess it will be similar with all languages that use this difficult to produce sound, so I don't think one will stand out too much without it. 89.102.168.244 (talk) 22:03, 20 December 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Recessive gene

It is impossible for people who possess the recessive gene for tongue rolling to produce this sound.

I find this very hard to believe. There aren't whole swaths of speakers of languages with trills that simply can't make the trill. The sound simply wouldn't have evolved if there were large numbers of people who can't produce it. I have heard of this supposed tongue rolling gene, and I can't begin to imagine how it has any effect on the ability to to produce alveolar trills.

Are there any sources for this claim? Nohat 17:57, 21 July 2005 (UTC)

I was wondering that, too. However, it's not true that there aren't "whole swaths of speakers" etc, at least depending on how you define a "whole swath". I'm an Italian who can't roll his R's (actually, I have somewhat learned by now, so it can't be a gene in any case), and I'm definitely not alone: "erre moscia", like this speech defect is familiarly called, is common enough in Italy that virtually nobody doesn't know what it is, or doesn't know anybody who has it. It's not dialect specific, although I think certain dialects of Italian do not (always) roll their R's, but that's not generally perceived as the same thing as having "erre moscia". I've read that some Spaniards also have this problem -- and from the wording of what I read, it seemed that it was common enough there, too. LjL 18:06, 21 July 2005 (UTC)
Like any difficult sound, such as English R, there will always be a certain number of native speakers who have difficulty producing the sound, but with speech therapy, most can be trained to correctly pronounce the sound. I can't speak to the specifics of [r] in Italian, but I know that [r] is the last sound acquired by Spanish speakers, and thus the most common sound that speech therapists work on.
An ordinary recessive gene will have approximately the same distribution among the populations of Spanish, Italian, and English speakers, but the number of English speakers who claim to be unable to produce [r] is much greater than the number of Spanish or Italian speakers. This also strongly points to the ability to produce [r] being learned and not genetic.
Finally, the "recessive gene for tongue rolling" has to do with the ability to curl up the sides of the tongue to form a U shape. This ability has nothing to do with the ability to produce [r], which does not involve a U-shaped tongue.
Is there any evidence at all that the inability to produce [r] is genetic? Nohat 18:38, 21 July 2005 (UTC)
I don't know. Hm, now, in my Italian R (that is, when I can pronounce it correctly, i.e. isolated or in simple words), the tongue is in about the same position and shape as with my English R. The English one can actually be further back in the mouth, depending on the time of the day (but I think the one further back in the mouth is the "correct" one).
So, in any case, I don't really see how a gene could impede me from pronouncing the Italian R without causing me problems with the English R too. Wikipedia says that a trill is produced by holding the tongue in place, and making it vibrate by means of the air stream, and not by muscles; I think this implies that no particular abilities are needed for producing a trill compared to an ordinary English R, except for some "experience" on how much air to exhale and how hard to press the tongue in order for the "trill trick" to work.
By the ways, it's news to me that many English speakers have difficulty with the English R: personally, I've always found it a blessing of the English language (one of the very few, with regard to pronunciation...), compared to the Italian R or even to other "easier" (for me) R's like the French and the German ones. LjL 19:29, 21 July 2005 (UTC)
My sister-in-law is a speech therapist and she says that R, L, and S are the three "biggies" in American English speech therapy, especially with kids. Nohat 20:37, 21 July 2005 (UTC)
Denelson, the person who wrote the 'recessive gene' claim, and I have had a discussion about this on the Talk:Uvular trill page. He's a native English speaker of a non-trilled dialect. I don't know anything about speech therapy, but I will hazard the guess that he has the gene Nohat mentioned above, and was told that if you can't "roll" your tongue, you can't "roll" your ars.
Wikipedia now says that the trill is produced by the airstream, because I corrected it after having this discussion with Denelson. It had previously said that a trill is a series of taps in rapid succession. If you listen to how Denelson approximates a trill, that's exactly what s/he does: D can do this amazingly fast. I have the feeling s/he's been barking up the wrong tree.
While it might be appropriate to mention that [r] tends to be the last sound learned by children in Spanish, or that it is commonly a problem with speech defects (if we did something similar with [l] and lithps), I don't think that this 'gene' statement is justified. I would certainly like to see some real evidence of it first; otherwise I think we should delete. kwami 22:01, 2005 July 21 (UTC)
C'est un fait accompli. Nohat 22:29, 21 July 2005 (UTC)
I agree. I also agree that we should possibly mention the commonness of R-related speech defects. What I found strange after a (previous) search on the Web is that while in Italian we have a term that everyone knows for that kind of speech defect ("erre moscia", though of course it's not a technical term, quite the contrary), I couldn't find similar terms in Spanish or, say, Swedish -- which made me think this kind of defect was much more common in Italy than in other places where rolled R's are used. Really, this all puzzles me somewhat. LjL 22:38, 21 July 2005 (UTC)
That may simply be accidental. In English we have a special word for [s] defects ("lisp"), but none for [l] -> [w] or [r] -> [w] defects, despite the fact that they're well known. For example, the [r] defect has been popularized by the cartoon character Elmer Fudd, who says "Be vewy vewy quiet. I'm hunting wabbits." He's been saying that since the 1930's, but there's no word for it. kwami 23:20, 2005 July 21 (UTC)
The Elmer Fudd /r/ impediment I've heard is described as a "whorl". The "joke" is that the name of a speech impediment is the one that cannot be pronounced by someone who has it: lisp (lithp), stutter (stu-stu-stut-ter), whorl (whowew). I've just asked a Colombian and he says there is a (fairly rude) word gago that means someone who produces a uvular trill instead of an alveolar trill for /r/ in Spanish. Having trouble verifying either of these with Google searches at the moment though. Nohat 23:23, 21 July 2005 (UTC)
R-related speech defects are common among Finns, too (ärrä-vika) but for most children speech threrapy helps. But no, I've never heard this would have to with any gene. -EnSamulili 20:26, 28 July 2005 (UTC)
After further practice trying to articulate a trill in the right spot, I seem to have produced both velar (/ʀ̟/) and palatal (/r̠/) trills. If I try putting my tongue at the alveolar ridge and blowing, which is what seems to be necessary for an /r/, I get a rigmarole of other sounds, such as /ɮ/ or /z/, instead. I just can't seem to pronounce an alveolar trill at all.
You know, I'm really starting to think that the IPA should switch the symbols for the alveolar trill and the alveolar approximant.  Denelson83  16:45, 30 July 2005 (UTC)
Well, the approximant ar is quite rare, and the trill quite common, so that would smack of Anglocentrism. If you can do a palatal, that may be close enough (do you mean retroflex? is it the tip of your tongue that vibrates?). As for the velar, that's been judged to be impossible for good reason: it's not thought that you can get the entire body of your tongue to vibrate. If you're really producing a velar trill, you should send a recording to Ladefoged! kwami 18:44, 2005 July 30 (UTC)
No, it's not retroflex at all, because the tip of my tongue is pointing straight. And when I look at the IPA consonant table, it shows the "palatal trill" articulation to be judged impossible, but not the "velar trill." When I make a conscious attempt at a velar trill, I can feel the body of my tongue vibrating against my soft palate.  Denelson83  19:58, 30 July 2005 (UTC)
Oops... I got it wrong. Yes, the velar trill has apparently been judged to be impossible, but not the palatal trill. And yet, I seem to be able to produce a velar trill. Could it be that I'm really pronouncing nothing more than an advanced uvular trill?  Denelson83  20:04, 30 July 2005 (UTC)
Hm... I, too, think (!) I can produce a velar trill. There is a slight chance it's actually palatal; but it's definitely not palatalized, and I've taken a lot of care not to make it uvular (my default rhotic). It sounds quite ugly, however, and I don't expect it to occur in any language. (Needless to say I find it rather difficult, too.)
David Marjanovic | david.marjanovic_at_gmx.at | 0:00 CET-summertime | 2006/4/2

Incidently, my phonetics professor (Leiden University) did tell us in class that some 4% of the population are unable to pronounce the [r] due to genetics, amongst which he himself, so there may be some truth to this. (He mentioned speakers of Spanish being discriminated against for this.) It may not be the tong rolling gene (if that even exists) that is responsible and it may be so that people affected may still learn to approximate the [r] through speach therapy, but thas does not preclude a gene being involved here. We need to find some research into this. Sephia karta 16:14, 30 September 2006 (UTC)

[edit] The continuing saga of Denelson83 vs. [r]

I've just found out that my valiant attempts at making an [r] are still resulting in [ʀ]. Putting the tip of my tongue against my alveolar ridge and blowing still makes the back of my tongue vibrate against my uvula.

I talked to one of my college instructors, who is a native Czech speaker, and she showed me visually how to make an alveolar trill. I observed her rapidly vibrating the tip of her tongue against her alveolar ridge. And then when I try to do that, I just get [ɾ\ɾ\ɾ\ɾ], which is not the same thing. She told me to try pronouncing [td] as the first step towards making the elusive alveolar trill, but I don't think that will work for me.

-- Denelson83  18:42, 6 October 2005 (UTC)

I recently learned how to roll my Rs (and by recently I mean last week). I haven't got it down perfectly yet but I can pronounce it in most instances, which is amazing considering how I couldn't even begin to pronounce it before.

Unfortunately, nobody can tell you how to trill your Rs. It's a very serendipidous moment and I think it's that way for everybody. I'll give my advice, but it won't be bulletproof; every sure-fire way to learn R-rolling that I've ever followed has ended in failure. What I hate more than anything in the world is the advice to "just purr like a cat". If we could purr like cats, we wouldn't be asking how to do it, now would we? A close second is to say "pot of tea" over and over -- while that is useful later on, it's worthless advice in teaching how to do it.

The most important thing is to keep trying; the second, to be very, very patient.

The way it happened for me: first, forget any notion that the sound is an R. Don't try to make anything resembling an R while doing it or it will not work. Your tongue is going to be flopping around on your alveolar ridge; it's an alveolar consonant like any other and you should think of it as such. Now to begin, just play around with your mouth, lips, tongue... blow raspberries like you did when you were a kid, buzz your lips, vibrate your mouth area as much as you possibly can. Just pretend you're five years old again and making noises.

When you're vibrating your lips, stick your tongue around where they meet, not so much that it stops your lips from moving but just enough to catch the vibration (sort of like the positioning for a "th" sound). Your tongue will catch the lips' vibration and begin to vibrate. This is it -- this is the vibration that you want to reproduce. The R will feel an awful lot like this, and it's a lot easier to learn a letter when you know what it feels like.

Now imitate a motorcycle or whatnot -- something with a loud engine, or a machine gun -- and try to make that same kind of vibration in your tongue. With any luck it'll start flailing around wildly and you'll churn up air and spit everywhere. As long as your tongue is moving, that's good! Practice some more, but don't add voicing yet. Now try to contain it a little bit so you at least have the ability to trill your tongue against some mouth surface on command. The hard part is over; the difficulty is entirely in getting your tongue to "buzz" the way it has to, and it's pretty simple from that point.

Now try to contain your untamed trill a bit: say "pot of tea pot of tea pot of tea..." repeatedly, or some other magic phrase that's supposed to make you roll your Rs right then and there, and get a feel for where the tongue is landing. Trill your tongue again and aim it right there. If it's going up and down a lot, gently take some force off of it. There's a sweet spot in how much force to apply, and you'll know it when you feel it. Finally, add the voicing (this may take several attempts in itself) and you've got yourself a crude, but genuine, trilled R. Refine it by going through vocabulary lists in your target language and pronouncing all of them so you can iron the wrinkles out of your pronunciation and also learn how to say it in connection with other consonants and vowels (altough be warned that learning letter combinations can be almost as frustrating as learning the rolled R itself).

And there you go. That may or may not help you, again, but that's the way it happened for me and it all happened over the course of a day. If it doesn't work, keep at it. I tried several methods before I learned it and not one of them worked; I had to discover it on my own. From what I've read, most people do. It took me eight years of trying to do and I've often wondered if I was genetically cursed, but I think it's possible for anybody to do... it's just as hard for English speakers as "th" is for non-English speakers. I'd go so far as to call it the most difficult sound in all of the European languages, excepting R-hacek. Most people have an affinity for either the front trill (this R) or the back trill (the French R); the French R has always been second-nature for me but the alveolar R took years and years of work. I'm not sure why people are generally good at one trill or the other, or sometimes neither, but rarely both. It's interesting to wonder, but that's all based on a highly-unscientific observation, after all.

N.B. Knowing how to breathe is half the battle. It's hard to explain but it's the key to getting that wild flapping under control. You'll find it eventually, and once you tame it well you'll have pretty full control over your tongue. Being able to use it in combinations, though, is the hard part (R before or after non-dental stop consonants tends to trip me up). —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 68.238.164.118 (talk • contribs) 01:10, 15 October 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Tim Hortons

Why the silly comment about Tim Hortons? It's not popular to say that in Canada and adds nothing of value to the article. I say it should be removed. Also, what's with the apostrophe in "rolled R's"?

See the Tim Hortons article.  Denelson83  22:18, 8 October 2005 (UTC)

I'm familiar with the ad campaign and I insist that it's not popular or cool to say that in Canada. Okay, I'll admit, I think it's annoying.

Edit made. Whatever happened to the Wiki "be brave in edits" philosophy? ;) 65.95.111.52 03:42, 22 December 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Rolled R versus Trilled R

In most of my phonetic texts, the expression "rolled r" is used to refer to the uvular trill. "Trill" is used to generally to the alveolar trill. And "burring" is the standard English pronunciatioin for an initial "r". This treatment is fairly consistent all the way back to some texts written in 1900. The use of the expression "guttural r" to refer to the uvular trill is very rare, and somewhat ambiguous anyway, since the word "guttural" is just an antiquated synonym for "velar". It survives into modern English lay writing in the expression "guttural speech" used to describe languages such as Dutch or Swiss German which contain an inordinate portion of strongly pronounced velar fricatives and affricates. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 207.118.87.154 (talk • contribs) 00:23, 10 March 2006 (UTC)

That's uvular. Swiss German has the voiceless uvular but no velar fricative; Dutch has both, depending on the dialect or something (like, Dutch language says <g> is [γ], but I've heard Belgians pronounce it as [χ].
Forget about "guttural". Merge Guttural R into Uvular trill.
David Marjanović | david.marjanovic_at_gmx.at | 15:33 CET-summertime | 2006/4/3

[edit] Use in rough Japanese

I've noticed the "rolled R" being used by Japanese TV characters who are a bit thuggish, and this page: [1] tends to support this. Am I right or is it a different sound? (I'm no linguist, so I couldn't tell an aveolar flap from a hole in the ground...) It would be ironic that a sound the French consider a form of verbal flourish would also be a sign of uncouthness in Japan! Dave-ros 17:55, 15 January 2007 (UTC)

Yeah, many speakers I've come across can do it, though many can't and will express their desire to be able to trill their ラ行 in anger. As far as I can tell it's the same sound; laminal and alveolar, and some speakers may pronounce it post-alveolar or pre-palatal, though I can't think why seeing how the flap in Japanese is alveolar. 218.229.72.163 11:02, 17 March 2007 (UTC)
From what I've heard of trills in Japanese, they sound like straightforward alveolar ones. According to my Japanese teacher who lived in Japan for quite a while, rolling one's "r"s was associated with members of the yakuza almost as much as their trademark tattoos and missing pinkies.
Peter Isotalo 10:19, 19 March 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Use in the arts

Anyone think that it's use in classical vocal music and theater in English should be mentioned?--Tabun1015 15:45, 9 March 2007 (UTC)

Sure, I've even got a recording of "La Marseillaise" where the singer uses an alveolar trill. I think it should certainly be pointed out that it's used in singing to better project the /r/ sound, since any kind of uvular or fricative can't be nearly as well projected as the alveolar trill can. -- ErikB 00:20, 12 September 2007 (UTC)

I don't know if that's the reason. Ƶ§œš¹ [aɪm ˈfɻɛ̃ⁿdˡi] 06:05, 12 September 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Use in Romanian

It is used in Romanian, and it is the only way to pronounce it (no other types of R...) yet there's absolutely no mention of it here, and even when it says most romance languages it's the only one that uses it and is not there!

[edit] The Turkish Final "r"

We native Turkish speakers of Turkey are often reminded that our final "r" sounds much like the French "j", to our great astonishment. We are all convinced however that what we pronounce is a regular "r" sound as in Italian... until the first time we ask a stranger to repeat the word. He/She will nearly always reproduce a "zh" or "sh" sound for the final "r". It has been suggested in several blogs that the sound is similar to the Czech "ř" for which the IPA gives /r̝/, yet I am not convinced that the tongue is raised in Turkish while pronouncing this phoneme. Most phoneticians seem to have neglected the particularity of its pronunciation. If any professionals or laymen have ideas as to the appropriate IPA transcription for this phonetic phenomenon, I would be glad to know.

[edit] Use in Icelandic

Alveolar trill is also used in Icelandic (the page does not mention this). As is stated in pargraph about Turkish, in final positions it, too, seems to often take on quality of the Czech "ř" (IPA /r̝/). —Preceding unsigned comment added by 89.102.168.244 (talk) 21:34, 20 December 2007 (UTC)