Guttural R
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In linguistics, guttural R (throaty R or French R) refers to pronunciation of the phoneme R as a guttural consonant. These consonants are usually found as a uvular R, but can also be realized as a velar R, a pharyngeal R or a glottal R. Speakers of some languages regard the alveolar and the guttural /r/ to be alternative pronunciations of the same phoneme, which is remarkable in light of how different these sounds are in terms of their articulation.
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[edit] Guttural R languages
The guttural R is the usual form of the consonant R in most of what is now France, Belgium, Netherlands, northern Germany and Denmark. The consonant is also found other parts of the world, but in most other places it has little or no cultural association nor interchangeability with the more common alveolar and retroflex /r/.
[edit] Romance languages
[edit] French
The French language is perhaps the most well-known example of a guttural R language, to the extent that this pronunciation is widely stereotyped. In the standard dialect of Paris, it is pronounced as a trill (IPA /ʀ/), while in most of the rest of France it is pronounced as a voiced (IPA /ʁ/) or voiceless (IPA /χ/) uvular fricative. However, in much of southern France /r/ remains alveolar rather than uvular.
It is not known when the guttural R entered the French language, although it is quite possible that this pronunciation was originally just a subversive variant of the original alveolar trill which caught on and may have become commonplace in the mid or late eighteenth century. Molière's Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme, written in the seventeenth century, has a professor describe the sound of R as an alveolar trill.
Rural Quebecois as well as Quebecois from older generations generally use an alveolar trill, and as such this older pronunciation feature must have been retained after the French colonists in Canada were isolated from "Mother France."
French Canadian broadcasters as well as Quebec Province's urbanites, however, try to mimic the modern "guttural R" pronunciation of France perhaps as the result of influence by modern French media from France.
Generally speaking, classical choral and operatic French pronunciation requires the use of an alveolar trill when singing, since an alveolar trill is easier to project than any guttural R-sound, be it an uvular trill or an uvular fricative.
[edit] Portuguese
Standard versions of Portuguese have two rhotic phonemes, although they only contrast between vowels. In older Portuguese, these were the alveolar flap /ɾ/ (which occurred at the end of syllables) and the alveolar trill /r/ (which occurred at syllable onset), like in Spanish. However, in the 19th century the voiced uvular fricative [ʁ], penetrated the upper classes in the region of Lisbon in Portugal, and by the late 20th century it had replaced the alveolar trill in most of the country's urban areas. In the rural regions, the trill is still dominant, but most of the country's population currently lives in or near the cities. The uvular trill [ʀ] is also heard sometimes. In Africa, the classical alveolar trill is mostly still dominant, due to isolation. In Brazil, on the other hand, it has developed into a voiceless velar fricative [x], or a voiceless glottal fricative [h], although the trill remains frequent in the three southernmost states. In the caipira dialect of Brazilian Portuguese, /r/ is realized as the alveolar approximant [ɹ], especially in syllable-final position.
Many Brazilian dialects now use the equivalent to the trill at the end of syllables, rather than the flap. Word final rhotics may be silent when the last syllables is stressed, in colloquial speech (especially in Brazil and some African countries).
[edit] Breton
The Breton language, spoken in Brittany (France), which is a Celtic language rather than a Romance language, but is heavily influenced by French, retains an alveolar trill in some dialects.
[edit] Continental West Germanic
Many Low Franconian and Low Saxon varieties adopted a uvular R. While many of the Upper German varieties maintained an alveolar trill (IPA /r/), many Central German varieties also adopted a uvular R. The development of a uvular R in these regions is not entirely understood, but a common theory is that these languages adopted a uvular R because of French influence, though the reason for uvular R in modern European French is not itself well understood.
The Frisian language, though spoken in part on the continent and surrounded by guttural R languages, is more closely related to English and Scots and unusually retains an alveolar R.
[edit] Dutch and Afrikaans
In modern Dutch, quite a few different R-sounds are used. In Belgium, the usual R is an alveolar trill, but uvular R does occur, mostly in the province of Limburg, in the region around Ghent and in Brussels. In the Netherlands, uvular R is the dominant R-sound in the southern provinces of Noord-Brabant and Limburg. In the rest of the country, the situation is more complicated. Uvular R is common, but not dominant, in the western agglomeration Randstad, including cities like Rotterdam, The Hague and Utrecht (the dialect of Amsterdam usually has an alveolar R though). Uvular R is also used in some major cities outside of the Randstad area, such as Zwolle, Almelo and Leeuwarden. Outside of these uvular R core areas, alveolar trill is common. People learning Dutch as a foreign language also tend to use the alveolar trill because it contrasts better with the voiceless velar fricative sound /x/ used for CH and G in Dutch. The Afrikaans language of South Africa also uses an alveolar trill R, except in the non-urban rural regions around Cape Town where it is uvular.
[edit] Standard German
Most German varieties of Standard German are spoken with a uvular R, even though the first standardized pronunciation dictionary by Theodor Siebs prescribed an alveolar pronunciation. The alveolar pronunciation is used in many standard German varieties of Southern Germany, Austria and Switzerland. In many varieties, both with uvular R and with alveolar R, R is often vocalized at the ends of syllables.
[edit] Yiddish
The upper/lower distinction also historically influenced the development of upper and lower dialects of Yiddish, the particular High German dialect originally spoken by Ashkenazi Jews along the Rhine. As these Jews migrated to other lands such as the United States and Russia, they brought their particular pronunciations with them.
[edit] North Germanic
[edit] Danish and Swedish
The alveolar pronunciation of R predominates in most of Scandinavia, with additional retroflex pronunciations of consonant clusters /rd/, /rl/, /rn/, /rs/ and /rt/ in most of Norway and Sweden. However, Denmark proper speaks R entirely as a voiced pharyngeal fricative, and the Swedish region of Skåne speaks R entirely as a uvular trill. The Swedish as spoken in Skåne is considered a dialect of Swedish, though for historical reasons it is also largely mutually intelligible with the Danish spoken across the strait in Denmark. The origin of guttural R in Denmark and Skåne is not well understood, as R in both regions was alveolar before Sweden received Skåne.
[edit] Norwegian
Most of Norway uses an alveolar flap. In the western and southern part of South-Norway however, uvular R is gaining ground. The centre of uvular R spreading is the city of Bergen, and it's still spreading today. Linguists suppose that dialects that use retroflexes have a 'natural defense' against uvular R and thus will not adopt it. These dialects are primarily found in the eastern part of South-Norway and in North-Norway. It is estimated that uvular R eventually will spread to every non-retroflex dialect in Norway.
[edit] Sorbian
Unusual among Slavic languages but common in the region where it is spoken, the two Sorbian languages in eastern Germany are typically spoken with a uvular trill, under German influence.
[edit] Semitic languages
[edit] Hebrew
In Hebrew, the classical pronunciation of the consonant ר rêš was an alveolar flap (IPA /ɾ/), and was grammatically treated as an ungeminable phoneme of the language. In most dialects of Hebrew among the Jewish diaspora, it remained a flap or a trill (IPA /r/). However, some Ashkenazi dialects as preserved among Jews in northern Europe carried a uvular R, either as a trill (IPA /ʀ/) or fricative (IPA /ʁ/). This was because many (but not all) native dialects of Yiddish were spoken that way, and their liturgical Hebrew carried the same pronunciation.
[edit] Yiddish Influence
Though an Ashkenazi Jew in Czarist Russia, the Zionist Eliezer ben Yehuda based his Standard Hebrew on the Sephardic dialect originally spoken in Spain, and therefore recommended an alveolar R. But as the first waves of Jews to resettle in the Holy Land were northern Ashkenazi, they came to speak Standard Hebrew with their preferred uvular articulation as found in Yiddish or modern standard German, and it gradually became the most prestigious pronunciation for the language. The modern State of Israel has Jews whose ancestors came from all over the world, but nearly all of them today speak Hebrew with a uvular R because of its modern prestige and historical elite status.
[edit] Israeli Hebrew
Many Jewish immigrants to Israel spoke Arabic in their countries of origin, and pronounced Hebrew R as an alveolar trill identical to Arabic ر rāʼ. Under pressure to integrate, many of them compensated by pronouncing their Hebrew R as Arabic غ ġayn, which is itself usually pronounced as a voiced uvular fricative. However, in modern Sephardic and Mizrahi poetry and folk music, an alveolar R is sometimes used in preference.
[edit] Arabic
In Arabic, the letter غ is pronounced like a French "r". While most dialects of Arabic retain the Classical pronunciation of ر rāʾ as an alveolar trill (IPA /r/) or flap in some cases (IPA /ɾ/), several dialects convert it to a uvular trill (IPA /ʀ/). These include:
[edit] Guttural Pseudo-R
Some languages have a guttural consonant spelled as R, but mostly for associative convenience without any historical association with an alveolar /r/ phoneme. These are not considered true guttural R languages for this reason.
[edit] Kalaallisut
The dialects of Kalaallisut transliterate their voiced uvular fricative in Latin script as R. Kalaallisut R is the fricative counterpart of Q, a voiceless uvular plosive. The choice to use R was simply a convenience for the language's orthographers, drawing on uvular association with R in continental northern European languages.
[edit] J.R.R. Tolkien
The fantasy novels of J.R.R. Tolkien contained heavy linguistic detail, along with philosophical ideals of what constituted notions of beautiful and ugly language. Tolkien personally disliked "guttural" consonants, so in his fictional "fair" languages, he completely omitted uvular consonants and the voiced velar fricative (IPA /ɣ/), but kept other velar consonants intact. Thus his fictional "black" languages such as the Black Speech along with the native languages spoken by the Orcs naturally make use of the voiced velar fricative and uvular R, but the latter is also found in dialects of his Dwarves' language, so that he finally chose to not entirely demonize the sound. In contrast, however, the Elves spoke R as a "fair" alveolar trill at all times.
These conventions were not as strictly adhered to in the various film and animation versions of Tolkien's works. In particular, the Rankin-Bass animated adaptation of The Hobbit has the Elves of Mirkwood speaking with a voiced uvular fricative. In contrast, in Peter Jackson's The Lord of the Rings movie trilogy, the orcs and Uruk-hai speak in Cockney-style accents with alveolar and retroflex approximants.
[edit] References
- Mateus, Maria Helena & d'Andrade, Ernesto (2000) The Phonology of Portuguese ISBN 0-19-823581-X
