Retroflex Consonant - Occurrence

Occurrence

Although data is not precise, about 20 percent of the world's languages contain retroflex consonants of one sort or another. About half of these possess only retroflex continuants, with most of the rest having both stops and continuants. Retroflex consonants are concentrated in the Indo-Aryan and Dravidian languages of the Indian subcontinent.

The Nuristani languages of eastern Afghanistan also have retroflex consonants. Among Eastern Iranian languages, they are common in Pashto, Wakhi, Sanglechi-Ishkashimi, and Munji-Yidgha. They also occur in some other Asian languages such as Mandarin Chinese, Javanese and Vietnamese. The other major concentration is in the indigenous languages of Australia and the Western Pacific (notably New Caledonia). Here, most languages have retroflex plosives, nasal and approximants.

Retroflex consonants are relatively rare among European languages, occurring for example in Swedish and Norwegian in Northern Europe, and Sardinian, Sicilian, some Italian dialects such as Calabrian, Salentino and Lunigianese in Italy. In Swedish and Norwegian, a sequence of r plus a coronal consonant may be replaced by the coronal's retroflex equivalent, e.g. the name Martin is pronounced or, and nord ("north") is pronounced . This is sometimes done for several consonants in a row after an r — Hornstull is pronounced ). The apical alveolar type also occurs in peninsular Spanish and in Basque, although the phonological descriptions of these languages rarely refer to these sounds as "retroflex", preferring the (ambiguous) term "apico-alveolar".

The retroflex approximant /ɻ/ is an allophone of the alveolar approximant /ɹ/ in many dialects of American English, particularly in the Midwestern United States. Polish and Russian possess retroflex sibilants, but no stops or liquids at this place of articulation.

Retroflex consonants are largely absent from indigenous languages of the Americas with the exception of the extreme south of South America, an area in Southwestern US as in Hopi and Papago, and in Alaska and the Yukon Territory as in the Athabaskan languages Gwichʼin and Hän. In African languages retroflex consonants are also very rare, reportedly occurring in a few Nilo-Saharan languages. In southwest Ethiopia, phonemically distinctive retroflex consonants are found in Bench and Sheko, two contiguous, but not closely related, Omotic languages.‬

There are several retroflex consonants not yet recognized by the IPA. For example, the Iwaidja language of northern Australia has a retroflex lateral flap as well as a retroflex tap and retroflex lateral approximant ; and the Dravidian language Toda has a subapical retroflex lateral fricative and a retroflexed trill . Because of the regularity of deriving retroflex symbols from their alveolar counterparts, people will occasionally use a font editor to create the appropriate symbols for such sounds. (Here they were written with diacritics.) The Ngad'a language of Flores has been reported to have a retroflex implosive, but in this case the expected symbol is coincidentally supported by Unicode. Subapical retroflex clicks occur in Central Juu and in Damin.

Most languages with retroflex sounds typically have only one retroflex sound with a given manner of articulation. An exception, however, is the Toda language, with a two-way distinction among retroflex sibilants between apical (post)alveolar and subapical palatal.