ALVEOLAR

Alveolar sounds are produced by the tip or blade of the tongue moving up towards the alveolar ridge, the bony protrusion you can feel if you curl your tongue back just behind your top front teeth.

The symbol /r/ is used for the phoneme here and throughout the book, primarily because it is typographically convenient; but different realizations of /r/ are found throughout the English-speaking world, and as we have seen, [r] itself, the voiced alveolar trill, is rather rare. The tapped realization, [ɾ], is also alveolar; but another even more common pronunciation is not. This is the voiced retroflex approximant, [ɹ], which is produced with the tip of the tongue curled back slightly behind the alveolar ridge; this is the most common realization of /r/ for speakers of Southern Standard British English and General American.