Rhotics’

The last set of approximants we will look at is not one that appears on the IPA chart. The term ‘rhotics’ comes from the name for the Greek letter rho, , and has been the topic of quite considerable discussion. There are many symbols on the IPA chart which are based on the letter. Many of these represent the phonetic values of the letter in many European languages. For instance, English has [ɹ], French has [r ʁ], Finnish and Spanish have [ɾ r], and so on. If you look these symbols up on the IPA charts, however, you will see that they do not fit under a single heading for either place or manner of articulation. The term ‘rhotic’ has been coined to cover this set of sounds, and when it comes to English, we need to consider some extra sounds which are not part of the set just given.

The second thing to say is that not all rhotics are in fact approximants. For example, the trill [r] involves several short periods of closure of the tongue tip against the alveolar ridge, while the tap [ɾ] has just one. In English, most rhotics are approximants and they have a similar distribution in words to laterals: for example, they occur in similar environments in consonant clusters, and behave similarly with respect to voicing in such clusters. We will group rhotics together on functional grounds.

At the systematic level, we transcribe rhotics broadly with [r], since there is rarely any ambiguity about its value; narrower transcriptions are used below so that different types of [r] can be compared across varieties and to convey more of the phonetic detail.