R-Sounds

A few weeks ago in the comments on this post, some Linguaphiles were discussing the various r-sounds—approximants, trills, flaps, fricatives, etc.—that occur in the world's languages. This got me wondering what the most common r-sound is. As it happens, last year for a phonology project I imported the UPSID database (which I've mentioned before) into Access, so I can quickly write SQL queries on its contents: the phoneme inventories of 451 genetically diverse languages.

First, a word of explanation about UPSID's format. UPSID distinguishes phonemes using a set of binary features like [fric] (fricative) and [vd] (voiced). Since the phoneme inventories of the languages in UPSID were collected from printed sources with varying levels of detail, sometimes the features described in one language are less specific than in others. In particular, instead of simply having two features for dental and alveolar, UPSID has three: [dent] for dental, [alv] for alveolar, and [unspdent]. This last feature is short for "unspecified dental", and it's used when a source did not make clear if a particular phoneme or series of phonemes are dental or alveolar. It's necessary to understand this, because some [+unspdent] phonemes show up in the results below.

Here are the language counts for some common r-like sounds. In each row of the table, I've included a description of the phoneme, the IPA version, the UPSID character code, and the count of languages that contain it. (For the [unspdent] phonemes, I've left out the IPA version, since there's no way to mark that.)

voiced alveolar trill	[r]	r	95
voiced unspdent trill		"r	51
voiced dental trill	[r̪]	rD	9
voiced alveolar flap	[ɾ]	r[	91
voiced unspdent flap		"r[	26
voiced dental flap	[ɾ̪]	rD[	1
voiced unspdent r-sound		"rr	36
voiced alveolar r-sound	[ɹ]	rr	10
voiced dental r-sound	[ɹ̪]	rrD	1
voiced uvular fricative	[ʁ]	RF	22
voiced uvular trill	[ʀ]	R	4

The alveolar/dental trill is the most common of these sounds, with 155 languages having at least one of them (there are no languages with more than one of them). The alveolar/dental flap comes in second, with 118 languages. The approximant r-sounds (which include the English variant) are found in only 47 languages, and the uvular fricative and trill occur in only 22 and 4 languages, respectively.

Note that these numbers don't take any account of allophonic variation, because UPSID doesn't contain information about surface phones. It's perfectly possible that a language UPSID lists as having [r] but not [ɾ] in its inventory of phonemes actually has the flap in free variation with the trill. Still, I think these counts give some idea of which sounds are common, and which are rare.

[Now playing: "Saltarello" by Dead Can Dance]