Guttural R

Common card · No. 267083

Guttural R is the phenomenon whereby a rhotic consonant (an "R-like" sound) is produced in the back of the vocal tract (usually with the uvula) 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 (throat-back-R and tongue-tip-R) to be alternative pronunciations of the same phoneme (conceptual sound), 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 (such as [r], [ɾ], and [ɹ]) and are (perhaps) 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, Denmark, the southern parts of Sweden and southwestern parts of Norway. It is also frequent in Flanders and the Netherlands, eastern Austria, Yiddish (and thence Ashkenazi Hebrew), Luxembourgish, and among...

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