Non-alveolar articulations

Rhotics need not be alveolar, as we have seen. They may also be labiodental (usually with some kind of valorization), though this is most often a feature of an individual’s speech rather than of a whole community.

Rhotics can also be produced at places of articulation further back than alveolar. One such type of rhotic is produced by combining retroflexion (i.e. backward curling of the tongue) and approximation, giving the sound , often known as ‘curled-r’ in the USA. This kind of articulation is also generally accompanied by labiovelarisation, and is found in many parts of the Western USA and in some parts of England.

A similar sound to this is known as ‘bunched-r’ or ‘molar-r’ and has no IPA symbol. It is described by Laver (1994: 302) as made not with the tongue tip (which is retracted), but with the tongue body, which is raised up to the back of the hard palate and the front of the soft palate (velum), roughly the same location as the first molar teeth (hence the name ‘molar-r’). For retroflex sounds, the surface of the tongue behind the tip is concave; but for molar-r the tongue shape is domed, or convex. These two sounds are very alike auditorily, and they are both found in the Western USA.

Other kinds of rhotics that are frequently mentioned involve some kind of constriction further back than the velum, such as at the uvula or in the pharynx. These are common articulations in related European languages, such as German, Dutch or Danish, but they are very unusual in English. Uvular approximants did occur in Northumberland (north east England), and can be heard in some of the recordings of the older speakers of the Survey of English Dialects, e.g. ‘tree’, , ‘straight’, . (These recordings are accessible online from the British Library.) This feature, if it persists among modern speakers, is rare.