Alveolar Approximant

The alveolar approximant is a type of consonantal sound used in some spoken languages. The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents the alveolar and postalveolar approximants is ⟨ɹ⟩, a lowercase letter r rotated 180 degrees, or in broad transcription ⟨r⟩; the equivalent X-SAMPA symbol is ⟨r\⟩.

For ease of typesetting, English phonemic transcriptions often use the symbol ⟨r⟩ instead of ⟨ɹ⟩, even though the former symbol represents the alveolar trill in phonetic transcription.