Sounds similar to the English sound spelled with the letter <r> are called rhotics. This post looks at rhotics.

Rhotics are named after the Ancient Greek letter ρ (rho).

Rhotics vary greatly in their:

• manner of articulation; and
• place of articulation.

Manner of articulation

Different rhotics are produced in different manners:

• as a trill (repeated vibration of the tip or blade of the tongue)
• as a flap or tap (a single, short contact of the tongue against the upper mouth [tap] or across the uppermouth [flap])
• as a fricative (with the tongue close to the upper mouth)
• as an approximant (with the tongue not as close to the upper mouth)

Place of articulation

Different rhotics are produced with the tongue in different places:

• against the teeth or the nearby alveolar ridge.
• behind the alveolar ridge.
• against the palate, sometimes with the tongue curled back (‘retroflex’).
• against the uvula. Some speakers of standard French and German use an uvular rhotic.

Rhotics in the IPA

Table 1 shows how the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) transcribes some rhotics.

Some authors classify some of these sounds differently from the classification in table 1.

Languages with more than one rhotic

Some languages have a rhotic phoneme with more than one allophone, or have more than one rhotic phoneme. Well known examples include:

• Italian  and Spanish both distinguish single /r/ from double (‘geminate’) /r/. So does Albanian. https://languagemiscellany.com/2026/02/language-sketch-albanian/  
• Russian (and some other Slavonic languages) have both palatal (‘soft’) and non-palatal (‘hard’) varieties of most consonants, including /r/. https://languagemiscellany.com/2025/01/hard-and-soft-consonants-in-russian/
• another Slavonic language, Czech, has both /r/ and also /r̝/, raised alveolar non-sonorant trill. It is written ⟨ř⟩ and one word containing it is the name of the composer Dvořák.

For more on phonemes and allophones, please see Phonemes and allophones – Language Miscellany

Is there anything special about rhotics?

Most writers seem to agree that no single phonetic property or set of phonetic properties (either acoustic or auditory):

• is shared by all rhotics; and
• distinguishes rhotics from other consonants.

Nevertheless, there are some indications that rhotics tend to behave as members of a single class. Rhotics:

• are sometimes the only consonants allowed in the 2^nd position in an initial consonant cluster (in the onset of a syllable) or in the 1^st position in a final consonant cluster (in the syllable’s coda). They sometimes share this privileged position with laterals and /or nasals.
• Rhotics often have syllabic variants or merge with (or modify) adjoining vowels.
• Rhotics often alternate with other rhotics. For example, in Farsi, /r/ is a trill in initial position, has a tap allophone in inter­vocalic position and a voiceless trill variant in word-final position. Said differently, rhotics tend to exhibit stable behaviour as members of a single class both within a language at one time, and as a language develops over time.

Some writers have suggested that there is a ‘family resemblance’ between members of the class of rhotics, with each member sharing some property with other members of the class, though no single property is shared by all.

Voicing

Most rhotics are voiced. In some languages, rhotics can even function as vowels.

Some languages have unvoiced rhotics.

Rhotic and non-rhotic varieties of English

As is well known, in some varieties of English (‘non-rhotic’ varieties), written <r> is not pronounced in some positions. In other varieties (‘rhotic’), <r> is pronounced in those positions.

Rhotics and laterals

Rhotics are often grouped with laterals (/l/ and similar sounds) into an overarching category of liquids. The following are reasons for identifying such a grouping:

• rhotics and laterals are among the most sonorous of the non-nasal consonants;
• rhotics and laterals often behave similarly in, for example, forming clusters with other consonants more freely than most other consonants do.
• some languages (eg Japanese and Korean) have only a single liquid phoneme which surfaces as a rhotic allophone in some contexts but as a lateral allophone in other contexts.
• rhotics and laterals are sometimes linked closely in some phonological examples. An example is when /l/ in the Latin adjectival suffix –alis is dissimilated to [r] when the root already contains a lateral e.g. nav-alis ‘naval but lun-aris ‘lunar’ https://languagemiscellany.com/2025/03/a-regular-dissimilation-from-latin/

Source

The Sounds of the World’s Languages, Peter Ladefoged and Ian Maddieson (1996)

Further reading

Chabot (2019) and Wiese (2001) discuss whether it is possible to define rhotics as a unified class.

What’s wrong with being a rhotic? Alex Chabot, Glossa: a journal of general linguistics 4(1) (2019). DOI: https://doi.org/10.5334/gjgl.618

The phonology of r, Richard Wiese, in Distinctive feature theory, edited by Tracey Alan Hall (2001)