Usage
See also: Rhotic consonant, R-colored vowel, and Guttural RIn science, the letter R is a symbol for the gas constant. Mathematicians use R or (an R in blackboard bold, displayed as ℝ in Unicode) for the set of all real numbers.
R represents a rhotic consonant in many languages, as shown in the table below. The International Phonetic Alphabet uses several variations of the letter to represent the different rhotic consonants; represents the alveolar trill.
| Alveolar trill | Listen | some dialects of British English or in emphatic speech, standard Dutch, Finnish, Galician, German in some dialects, Hungarian, Icelandic, Italian, Czech, Lithuanian, Latvian, Latin, Norwegian, Polish, Catalan, Portuguese (traditional form), Romanian, Scots, Spanish and Albanian 'rr', Swedish, Welsh |
| Alveolar approximant | Listen | English (most varieties), Dutch in some Dutch dialects (in specific positions of words), Swedish, Faroese, Sicilian |
| Alveolar flap / Alveolar tap | Listen | Portuguese, Catalan, Spanish and Albanian 'r', Turkish, Dutch, Italian, Venetian, Galician, Leonese |
| Voiced retroflex fricative | Listen | Spanish used as an allophone of /r/ in some South American accents; Standard Chinese (in pinyin); Vietnamese (southern dialects) |
| Retroflex approximant | Listen | some varieties of American English; Standard Chinese (in pinyin); and Gutnish |
| Retroflex flap | Listen | sometimes in Scottish English |
| Uvular trill | Listen | German stage standard; some Dutch dialects (in Brabant and Limburg, and some city dialects in The Netherlands), Swedish in Southern Sweden, Norwegian in western and southern parts |
| Voiced uvular fricative | Listen | German, Danish, French, standard European Portuguese 'rr', standard Brazilian Portuguese 'rr', Puerto Rican Spanish 'rr' and 'r-'. |
Other languages may use the letter r in their alphabets (or Latin transliterations schemes) to represent rhotic consonants different from the alveolar trill. In Haitian Creole, it represents a sound so weak that it is often written interchangeably with w, e.g. Kweyol for Kreyol.
Brazilian Portuguese has a great number of allophones of /ʁ/ such as, and, the latter three ones can be used only in certain contexts ( and as 'rr'; in the syllable coda, as an allophone of /ɾ/ according to the European Portuguese norm and /ʁ/ according to the Brazilian Portuguese norm). Usually at least two of them are present in a single dialect, such as Rio de Janeiro's, and, for a few speakers, .
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Famous quotes containing the word usage:
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—A.J. (Alfred Jules)
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“...Often the accurate answer to a usage question begins, “It depends.” And what it depends on most often is where you are, who you are, who your listeners or readers are, and what your purpose in speaking or writing is.”
—Kenneth G. Wilson (b. 1923)