Help talk:IPA/Dutch

Rhotic
Hey user:Nardog. The Dutch rhotic has a number of possible pronunciations and the closest ones known to English speakers are the rolled R or the French R, and the bunched R in the coda which sounds close to the English language R, the approximant. --Esperfulmo (talk) 00:23, 13 December 2023 (UTC)


 * @Esperfulmo The article currently mentions 'rolled R', with a link to alveolar tap/flap, this seems weird, as the rolled R is defined as a trill. Are you sure the American [ɾ] is that different from the Dutch [ɾ]? Exarchus (talk) 10:31, 29 December 2023 (UTC)
 * Maybe you got confused by Wikipedia saying the trill is often reduced to a "flap". But there is no source saying it is a flap, as distinct from a tap, so I changed the phonology article to "tap". Exarchus (talk) 12:19, 29 December 2023 (UTC)
 * Well, the rolled R is either the trilled or the flapped R which are both from the variations of the phoneme for the Dutch.
 * Yes, very sure that the voiced alveolar flap (sounding like one trill) is very different from the voiced alveolar tap (sounding closer to the D sound/plosive). Yes, we see on Wikipedia both terms used interchangeably, but they don't sound the same. Even the user who made the audio file for both consonants failed to produce a correct tap sound. If you natively speak a language with one of them and another which has the other, you can definitely tell the difference. There was a suggestion to use a small capital D for the tap to distinguish it from the flap ɾ, but I don't know why both are transcribed with the same character. See the Americanist phonetic notation. --Esperfulmo (talk) 12:24, 29 December 2023 (UTC)
 * The sound recording on wiktionary for 'city' (Audio (US)) sounds to me exactly like one would say Dutch 'sirrie' (except that this isn't a word). I see no reason why it can't be used as an approximation (and I'm not convinced it isn't exactly the same). Exarchus (talk) 14:00, 29 December 2023 (UTC)
 * Quoting from "The Sociophonetics and Phonology of Dutch r": "even those taps that are distinguishable in terms of their articulation from single-contact trills are auditorily/perceptually extremely similar to them." (p.170) Exarchus (talk) 14:29, 29 December 2023 (UTC)
 * From reading the mentioned paper, I can't conclude that Dutch 'taps' [ɾ] aren't real taps, but single-contact trills (which, as the paper indeed says, are articulatorily different). So I really think American intervocalic 't' is exactly the same thing. Exarchus (talk) 14:57, 29 December 2023 (UTC)
 * To quote extensively: "In conclusion, the predominance of taps in onsets makes any assumption that they are synchronically actually short (single-contact) trills less probable. If so, one would expect more variation with trills with two or three contacts, especially since the number of contacts are not under active control from the speaker. It is, in other words, not likely that there is an invariant trill target for all alveolar onset r, that is consequently not met due to articulatory or aerodynamic constraints. Nevertheless, since taps alternate freely with other manners of articulation in onsets, including trills (almost all speakers do variably use trills), it is demonstrably not the case that the tap is the single r-target either. This points towards an analysis in which both trills and taps, as well as fricatives and approximants, are available to all speakers who use alveolar variants in onsets." (p.176) Exarchus (talk) 15:56, 29 December 2023 (UTC)
 * OK, the paper mentions some difference between American [ɾ] and (in this case) Spanish [ɾ]:
 * "Taps can also be allophones of other, non-rhotic, sounds, such as, in American English, intervocalic /t/ in ladder, latter, city. There are phonetic differences between the two, apparent in x-ray footage (Ladefoged and Maddieson 1996): for an American English speaker producing a tap-/t/ there is anticipation during the preceding vowel in the form of retraction and raising of the tongue. The tongue is then moved forward to make the contact and returns to the floor of the mouth. For a Spanish speaker producing a tap-/r/, there is no such anticipation, but a quick upward and downward movement of only the tongue-tip." (p.171)
 * I still think using one as an approximation of the other is not far-fetched. Look at it the other way: how would you give an approximation for Dutch speakers of the American intervocalic 't'? The tap-r of course. Exarchus (talk) 17:43, 29 December 2023 (UTC)
 * Interesting quote from Articulatory Variation of the Alveolar Tap and Implications for Sound Change (Cathcart, 2012): "An acoustic and cineradiographic study by Monnot and Freeman (1972) shows that acoustically, English and Spanish alveolar taps are indistinguishable from each other."
 * I would not be surprised if someone showed that a perceived difference comes from the brain classifying the sounds as either /t/~/d/ or /r/... Exarchus (talk) 23:55, 29 December 2023 (UTC)
 * Assessing Rhotic Production by Bilingual Spanish Speakers (Cummings & Montrul, 2020): "The English flap and the Spanish tap are nearly identical, in that they are both produced with a rapid movement of the tongue tip or tongue blade against the alveolar ridge" Exarchus (talk) 10:01, 30 December 2023 (UTC)
 * What you may be thinking of is the situation in Arabic as I'm reading it on the Arabic phonology page: "The trill /r/ is sometimes reduced to a single vibration when single, but it remains potentially a trill, not a flap [ɾ]"
 * As I said, no indication this is the case in Dutch (or Spanish). Exarchus (talk) 13:33, 30 December 2023 (UTC)
 * So it would make sense to me to use [r̆] (r + breve) to indicate a single-vibration alveolar trill (what you seem to call 'flap'), and [ɾ] for the alveolar tap (often called flap).
 * And now I think I've finished rambling about taps/flaps ;-) Exarchus (talk) 15:39, 30 December 2023 (UTC)

I listened to wikt:city and it doesn't sound to me like a flap. For the case of the Egyptian pronunciation, the rhotic is in a free variation between a trill and a flap. The flap is quite more popular in the Nile Delta and some speakers from northern Egypt might exclusively use one variant. The flap is also used in Persian and other languages. They never sound quite close to the tap [ D ].

I know what you mean by recognizing sounds by one's brain that could be deceiving. Approximating the Dutch rhotic to the rolled R makes more sense, because:
 * it alternates between an alveolar trill and a weaker variant
 * the vast majority of people alternating between 2 variants have an alveolar trill versus an alveolar flap.

So which rhotics does your area use or what do you personally pronounce? There are those who use a uvular main variant. The Dutch case is very interesting! --Esperfulmo (talk) 17:30, 30 December 2023 (UTC)

An interesting example of a D like sound alternating with an R like sound in Hindustani. Listen to this cover of an Indian classic:, the title is spelled with a D: Thoda Resham Lagta Hai with an assumed voiced retroflex plosive, even though it sounds like a  voiced retroflex flap intervocalically. --Esperfulmo (talk) 18:14, 30 December 2023 (UTC)


 * - I know about this alternance between [ɖ] and [ɽ] in Indian languages and at first I found it strange as in my intuition, 'd' and 'r' have nothing to do with each other. But I figured out they really are articulatorily close.
 * - "I listened to wikt:city and it doesn't sound to me like a flap." In your terminology, it isn't a flap, but a tap and that's what the [ɾ] symbol is used for. And yes, it sounds like perfectly valid Dutch to me (when I think of it as an English word, I might be tempted to hear a /d/-like sound).
 * - The argument for approximating Dutch alveolar R as 'rolled R' is not that strong, as most of the time (in normal speech, not in sound fragments specifically pronounced for Wikipedia) it isn't a trill [r] and also not a reduced/short trill (what you call a flap), although people will intuitively think of it like that, but a tap. And that is what speakers of English know best anyway.
 * And yes, the 'R' I use is alveolar (not uvular or 'bunched'), so I am very familiar with it. And I have done some 'experiments' with pronouncing R's and come to the conclusion that the 'short' alveolar R in Dutch is not a 'long' R reduced to one contact, as I find it difficult to consistently produce just one trill (and not two, or zero). So I think that by now I know perfectly what you mean with flap vs. tap, and the short alveolar realisation of R in Dutch is clearly a tap (when I pronounce it, I can't prolong it, if I try really hard, I have to change something inside my mouth, and then I get a trill). And I'm pretty sure that Spanish /ɾ/ is as well.
 * - Whether Persian uses a flap or a tap, I'm not sure, do you have first hand knowledge of this? I can imagine it could be Arabic influence. But then in this paper it is said that the most prominent rhotic variant in Persian is a fricative (about which Wikipedia doesn't say anything). So for the moment I'm confused about this. Exarchus (talk) 20:11, 30 December 2023 (UTC)
 * If you want to see frequencies of alveolar trill vs. alveolar tap in Dutch, you can look at 'The sociophonetics and phonology of Dutch r' (if you can find it) and then for example starting at page 87 for Antwerp: 14% voiced alveolar trill in word onset vs. 65.7 % voiced alveolar tap (+ some other varieties), intervocally 5.7 % trill vs. 68.6 % tap and at syllable coda it is apparently most often 'voiceless alveolar trill/tap with frication', something I hadn't heard about before and which I am no doubt constantly using. Exarchus (talk) 20:38, 30 December 2023 (UTC)
 * I suppose some of the (short) trills might be classified as 'flaps' (in your terminology), but that is not what the tap is. Exarchus (talk) 21:28, 30 December 2023 (UTC)
 * Thanks for sharing all of the sources <3
 * From the first look, the paper mentioned 3 Persian allophones and used the term tap. Never mind the Persian rhotic for now.
 * Regarding Spanish, it has a trilled version spelled with double R, e.g. caro vs. carro which doesn't sound like a long flap.
 * I actually don't consider myself using different linguistic terminology. The Americanist phonetic notation has two symbols for each of the consonants. A single trill still sounds stronger than the flap, and Egyptians using either the flap or the trill could normally geminate it. E.g. "once" vs.  "woman" (vulgar)(مَرَّة vs. مَرَا). There are even those who use an approximant and geminate it, but an approximant is considered a lisp in Egypt. In Afroasiatic languages, gemination is common and phonemic.
 * Perhaps, the tap version can't be geminated or some languages can't geminate their rhotic. An interesting example is the word for "football" in Modern Hebrew was translated to כדור-רגל kadur regel, but evolved to כדורגל kaduregel because people pronounce it with a normally lengthed rhotic. Classical Hebrew accepted gemination, except for some consonants, like the rhotic. --Esperfulmo (talk) 02:26, 31 December 2023 (UTC)
 * Does the Spanish [r] (for example here) sound to you like an Arabic [r] (long trill) to you? Maybe there's a subtle difference there.
 * If you can find a description somewhere what Americanist phonetic notation actually means with 'tap' vs. 'flap', that would be useful. The Arabic phonology page also says: "the pronunciation of this single trill is between a trill [r] and a flap [ɾ]", where 'flap' is no doubt intended as 'tap'.
 * I can guarantee you that the tap [ɾ] in Dutch (and American English) is physically impossible to prolong/geminate. You'd have to start all over again and it sounds comical when I try it. As the Sociophonetics paper says (p.172), a short "schwa-like vocoid" gets inserted when [ɾ] is not preceded by a vowel, so repeating this tap sounds like [əɾəɾəɾəɾ]. Exarchus (talk) 09:36, 31 December 2023 (UTC)
 * This paper talks about Arabic 'taps', but I suppose you would call them 'flaps', because at one point it mentions "single long taps", which is impossible. So there seems to be total confusion about this in the literature. Exarchus (talk) 09:57, 31 December 2023 (UTC)
 * My personal guess is that the 'tap' will be more common cross-linguistically than the 'flap', because for producing a 'one-contact rhotic', the tap is ideal. Would be interesting to know for sure, and I'm really curious what the situation in Hindustani is. How does this sound to you? Sounds like a tap to me. Exarchus (talk) 10:08, 31 December 2023 (UTC)
 * The Urdu 'Audio (PK)' file for the same word seems to have a different R. Is this what you'd call a flap? Exarchus (talk) 10:25, 31 December 2023 (UTC)
 * The Urdu audio was a trill and the Hindi was a flap. Despite how the Urdu example was notated as a flap. --Esperfulmo (talk) 02:02, 1 January 2024 (UTC)
 * If you call the Hindi example a flap, then I'm confused and not sure anymore if there's a real difference between what you call a tap and a flap... Exarchus (talk) 15:36, 3 January 2024 (UTC)
 * In places where you might think there could be a geminated tap in Dutch, like the derivation 'doorrijden', I think that the first 'r' will in practice rather be this voiceless tap/trill with frication, and the second 'r' a voiced tap (in fast speech, this will rather be just one tap, or maybe an approximant; a trill would be emphatic I'd say). When I insist on making two voiced taps, there is a clear pause and it sounds like two words. Exarchus (talk) 13:34, 31 December 2023 (UTC)
 * I've started to notice something: languages that commonly have geminated consonants and that use the alveolar trill as main rhotic (Arabic, Italian, Finnish) do not seem to use the alveolar tap as a weakened form (it can be an allophone of /d/ in Finnish). As geminated consonants are normally just long versions of the short consonants, using a pair 'alveolar tap / alveolar trill' would be an exception to that rule, as the articulation is (as Sebregts calls it) "completely different". Dutch and Spanish don't generally have geminated consonants (don't let Dutch spelling confuse you there), so the brain doesn't have to have strict rules for producing short vs. long consonants.
 * At least that's my hypothesis. Exarchus (talk) 14:53, 31 December 2023 (UTC)
 * Notice that in Finnish, /d/ (which has a tap allophone) does not have a geminated form in native words. This might be relevant for my hypothesis. Exarchus (talk) 15:19, 31 December 2023 (UTC)
 * One thing about the Spanish trill: studies have shown that many or most speakers do not actually use the 'official' trill. This paper says: 'Hammond (1999:147) concludes that the “typical” trill is “absent in the normal discourse of the vast majority of native speakers.”'
 * That's why I linked to the 'rincón' page, where the speaker has a 'real' Spanish trill. Exarchus (talk) 21:04, 31 December 2023 (UTC)
 * The Spanish example sounded like an ordinary trill. --Esperfulmo (talk) 02:00, 1 January 2024 (UTC)

About Arabic, I was very specific on mentioning only Egyptian (Arabic), the spoken dialect. Most literature about "Arabic" studies one region of the Arabic speaking world and generalizes it from coast to coast (e.g. Watson researching Yemeni dialects), ignoring the great variation in local traditions and not distinguishing between reading Literary Arabic and spoken dialects. That's really another topic. In all Arabic dialects including Literary Arabic, all consonants accept gemination, even the [h] and the [ʔ]. I know it sounds very weird, but it's true.

If I'd distinguish the flap from the tap, I'd say the flap has a slight vibration whereas the tap has a sound similar to a weak plosive with an even lighter vibration than the flap.

It was a very interesting discussion about rhotics.

Let's wrap it up so as no one says we're getting out of the topic of improving the content of the IPA page :) --Esperfulmo (talk) 02:20, 1 January 2024 (UTC)

wiktionary page
@Esperfulmo I came across the Dutch pronunciation page on wiktionary and I think it's full of inconsistencies/inaccuracies, this one is better. Would you want to update the wiktionary page (or just copy/paste this one there)?

One thing that might be improved here is that there's a difference in quality (in standard speech) between /ɑ/ and /aː/, so if you use 'father' for both, this is not so accurate. /aː/ is more like the General American example here (but long), and /ɑ/ more like the RP pronunciation example (but short). By the way, the sound example for Dutch 'bad' sounds to me like a Brabantian [a] pronunciation, so not the 'official' [ɑ]. (edit: I'm not so sure anymore it'd be Brabantian, but it does sound Belgian to me. Anyway, the difference in vowel quality between 'bad' and 'aap' in the recordings seems clear to me.) Exarchus (talk) 17:19, 28 December 2023 (UTC)


 * Well, I changed the approximation for /aː/ to "British lad, but long", I obviously mean modern British and not the older RP. Exarchus (talk) 21:39, 28 December 2023 (UTC)
 * Hey Exarchus. The table has approximations that will never be precise. It's for users who can't read IPA. About Wiktionary guides, I personally don't think there should be a page there for each language, since they are mostly copied from Wikipedia and a simple redirect would be sufficient. I normally don't rely of the guides there unless they have some peculiarities to follow there instead of what's common here, like Arabic transliterations. --Esperfulmo (talk) 12:28, 29 December 2023 (UTC)