# English and Chinese: Unique hard 'R' sound



## vintagelemonade

Hello,

A Linguistics major friend of mine recently told me that the only two known languages that use the hard 'R' sound (as in pirates saying "Arrrr!" or the English onomatopoeia for a dog barking, "Rrrrruff!") are English and Chinese. Can anyone confirm/disprove this?

Thanks!


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## Outsider

The English "r" does not sound hard at all to me, quite the contrary. It's called an alveolar approximant, and if Wikipedia is right it is indeed a rare sound. 

As for Chinese, it seems that standard Mandarin has a sound which is a bit different, a retroflex approximant. But I see that it can be found in some dialects of American English, too...


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## palomnik

It is a rare sound.  I does also occur in Tamil, though, or something very close to it.


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## Outsider

Indian languages typically have retroflex sounds. The English "r" is not truly retroflex.


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## modus.irrealis

How could someone tell whether they use an alveolar or retroflex approximant? I'm trying to figure what I do with my tongue when I say "r" but my tongue doesn't go as far back as where I imagine retroflex consonants are made (and the pirate "arr" which does seem to have a retroflex is different than the way I say "are"), but it is further back than where I say "t" or "d". Or maybe there's no strict boundary between the two types of sounds and some r's are in between.


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## Outsider

If phoneticians have separate symbols for each, there's probably a way to distinguish them.

But I admit that the IPA makes some distinctions which are quite inaudible for many people. For instance, I don't think I'm able to split the difference between a voiced and a voiceless velar approximant (two sounds which exist in some dialects of Portuguese), or between the voiceless dental fricative (the English voiceless "th") and the voiceless dental approximant (the "z" of peninsular Spanish)...


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## Taiyiyi

What　ａｂｏｕｔ　Sｐａｎｉｓｈ？　R＇ｓ　ｐｒｅｔｔｙ　ｈａｒｄ　ｔｈｅｒｅ　ｔｏｏ　ｎｏ？


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## Lugubert

vintagelemonade said:


> Hello,
> 
> A Linguistics major friend of mine recently told me that the only two known languages that use the hard 'R' sound (as in pirates saying "Arrrr!" or the English onomatopoeia for a dog barking, "Rrrrruff!") are English and Chinese. Can anyone confirm/disprove this?
> 
> Thanks!


I have no idea what a "hard 'R'" is, nor have I ever heard a pirate speaking. But when I speak Dogese (Doggish?), I use the Parisian/German/south Swedish [R]. I can't identify any 'r' sounds in Chinese; the Pinyin 'r' is more like a French 'j' but less voiced.


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## ernest_

modus.irrealis said:


> How could someone tell whether they use an alveolar or retroflex approximant?



In the US and Canada they have a retroflex approximant, while in Britain  (except in some areas in Scotland) they have an alveolar approximant.


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## Outsider

Are you perhaps thinking of rhotic and non-rhotic accents? That's a different matter...


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## ernest_

No, I know most English are non-rhotic, but if you take a random American and a random English and tell them to say "here it is", chances are that the American will do a retroflex approximant and the English an alveolar approximant.


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## CapnPrep

Lugubert said:


> I can't identify any 'r' sounds in Chinese; the Pinyin 'r' is more like a French 'j' but less voiced.


There are two pinyin "r"s: initial (e.g. 人 rén "person") and final (e.g. 耳 ěr "ear"). The first one can be as you described it, with a fricative quality. But I think people are talking about the second one here, which does sound very similar to an American "r". Wikipedia gives inconsistent transcriptions (both /ɚ/ and /ɻ/ in the Erhua article), so I don't know what the official story is.


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## vince

As there are many Mandarin speakers in my university, I can tell you that the Mandarin and English "r" 's sound nothing alike.

Perhaps the Mandarin one is not an approximant while the English one is. Note that the Mandarin one can be substituted with the voiced retroflex fricative (like the zh in Russian and z' (z with a dot) in Polish) and it doesn't really make a difference in sound.

Cantonese does NOT have an r-sound. In fact, when they talk in English they substitute a "w". (They also have a non-rhotic accent). Cantonese pronunciations of Chinese characters that are pronounced with an "r" in Mandarin usually have a "y" instead.


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