Trill consonant

Phonemic trills

Trill consonants included in the International Phonetic Alphabet:

• – Voiced bilabial trill
• – Voiceless bilabial trill
• – Voiced alveolar trill
• – Voiceless alveolar trill
• – Voiced retroflex trill
• – Voiceless retroflex trill
• – Voiced uvular trill
• – Voiceless uvular trill
• – Voiced epiglottal trill
• – Voiceless epiglottal trill

In addition,

• – Velopharyngeal trill; the velopharyngeal fricative found in disordered speech sometimes involves trilling of the velopharyngeal port, producing a 'snort'.

The bilabial trill is uncommon. The coronal trill is most frequently alveolar , but dental and postalveolar articulations and also occur. An alleged retroflex trill found in Toda has been transcribed (that is, the same as the retroflex flap), but might be less ambiguously written , as only the onset is retroflex, with the actual trill being alveolar. The epiglottal trills are identified by the IPA as fricatives, with the trilling assumed to be allophonic. However, analyzing the sounds as trills may be more economical. There are also so-called strident vowels which are accompanied by epiglottal trill.

Impossible onesThe cells in the IPA chart for the velar, (upper) pharyngeal, and glottal places of articulation are shaded as impossible. The glottis quite readily vibrates, but this occurs as the phonation of vowels and consonants, not as a consonant of its own. Dorso-palatal and velar vibratory motions of the tongue are occasionally produced, especially during the release of dorsal stops, and ingressive velar trills occur in snoring, but not in normal speech. The upper pharyngeal tract cannot reliably produce a trill, but the epiglottis does, and epiglottal trills are pharyngeal in the broad sense. A partially devoiced uvular or pre-uvular (i.e. between velar and uvular) trill with some frication occurs as a coda allophone of in the Limburgish dialects of Maastricht and Weert.

Voiceless trills occur phonemically in e.g. Welsh and Icelandic. (See also voiceless alveolar trill, voiceless retroflex trill, voiceless uvular trill.) Mangbetu and Ninde have phonemically voiceless bilabial trills.

The Czech language has two contrastive alveolar trills, one a fricative trill (written ř in the orthography). In the fricative trill the tongue is raised, so that there is audible frication during the trill, sounding a little like a simultaneous and (or and when devoiced). A symbol for this sound, , has been dropped from the IPA, and it is now generally transcribed as a raised r, .

Nuosu Yi has two labiodental fricativized vowels (phonemically , with the underline indicating tenseness) in which the initial fricative elements are often realized as voiceless or voiced bilabial trills following bilabial and alveolar plosives; both the lax and tense variants may be either type of voicing, depending on the context.

A number of languages have trilled affricates such as and . The Chapacuran languages Wariʼ, Itene, and Oro Win, as well as the Naga language Sangtam, have a very unusual trilled phoneme, a voiceless bilabially post-trilled dental stop, .

A nasal trill has been described from some dialects of Romanian, and is posited as an intermediate historical step in rhotacism. However, the phonetic variation of the sound is considerable, and it is not clear how frequently it is actually trilled. In Inor, can mutate to , often when prefixes are attached to words beginning with , resulting in nasal vowel-consonant harmony. Despite these examples, no language is known to contrast phonemically.

Extralinguistic trills

A linguolabial trill (or, more precisely, a labiolingual trill ) is not known to be used phonemically but occurs when blowing a raspberry.

Velar trillSnoring typically consists of vibration of the uvula and the soft palate (velum), which may be described as an ingressive velic trill. Like the uvular trill, the ingressive velic trill does not involve the tongue; it is the velum that passively vibrates in the airstream. The Speculative Grammarian has proposed a jocular symbol for the sound (and also the sound used to imitate a pig's snort), a wide O with a double dot (ꙫ), suggesting a pig's snout. The Extensions to the IPA identifies an egressive fricative pronounced with this same configuration, common with a cleft palate, as velopharyngeal , and with accompanying uvular trill as () or ([[File:Feng trill.svg|12px|class=skin-invert]]).

Lateral trills are also possible and may be pronounced by initiating or with an especially forceful airflow. There is no symbol for them in the IPA.

Ejective trills are not known from any language although they are easy to produce. may occur as mimesis of a cat's purr.

Summary

Notes

References

Bibliography

• {{citation |editor1-last=Hardcastle |editor1-first=William J. |editor2-last=Laver |editor2-first=John |editor3-last=Gibbon |editor3-first=Fiona E.
• {{citation
• {{citation
• {{citation
• {{citation

References

1. (April 2017). "Nuosu Yi (Illustrations of the IPA)". Journal of the International Phonetic Association.
2. Abza, Tsehay. (2016). "Consonants and Vowels in the Western Gurage Variety Inor: Complex Connections between Phonemes, Allophones, and Free Alternations". Oslo Studies in Language.
3. Odden, David. (2005). "Introducing Phonology". [[Cambridge University Press]].
4. University of Hawaii ''Working Papers in Linguistics'', 1969, Volume 1, Parts 4–6, Page 115.
5. Bertil Malmberg & [[Louise Kaiser]], 1968, ''Manual of phonetics'', North-Holland, p. 325
6. (1995). "Handbook of the International Phonetic Association: A Guide to the Use of the International Phonetic Alphabet". Journal of the International Phonetic Association.
7. "SpecGram—Letters to the Editor". specgram.com.
8. Unicode support from 2021.