Tag Archives: trill

Why is rr different from ch and ll?

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Yesterday I had a linguistic panic attack at my gym. I always speak Spanish with the staff there, who are are uniformly Latina, and they know that I’m interested in the language. Yesterday one of them asked me why Spanish has more letters than English. This was a mistake on her part, because I immediately launched into an explanation of how the Real Academia Española (more accurately, a majority of the world’s Spanish language academies) eliminated ch and ll from the alphabet in 1994.

Afterwards the question popped into my head: what about rr, the Spanish double r that denotes a trill? Along with ch and ll, rr is the language’s third purely consonantal digraph, meaning a sequence of two consonant letters that together represent a single consonant sound. Was rr also affected in 1994? (I was 99% sure that it wasn’t.) If not, why not? And why hadn’t I thought about this before? (That was the panic part.) I bailed on my workout early.

Once I got home and consulted my bookshelf and the Internet, I quickly reassured myself that rr had never been part of the Spanish alphabet, and so had not merited the same scrutiny as ch and ll. Any easy proof of rr‘s inferior status is that words containing an rr have always been alphabetized as they would be in any other language. For example, in the 2006 compact Berlitz dictionary that I still keep on my shelf (but rarely use these days), corrupción precedes corsetería and perro precedes persecución. You will find the same order in an older dictionary. If rr were part of the alphabet, between r and s, then all cor- words would precede all corr- words, and all per- words would precede all perr- words.

That is exactly how ch and ll were treated before 1994. In a modern dictionary pecho ‘chest’ precedes pecoso ‘freckled’ and callar ‘to be quiet’ precedes calor ‘heat’. However, in pre-1994 dictionaries, pecoso preceded pecho and calor preceded calle. Because the digraphs ch and ll were then considered full-fledged elements of the Spanish alphabet, all pec– words preceded all pech– words, and all cal- words precede all call- words.

In fact, this uniquely Spanish version of alphabetical order motivated the 1994 alphabet reform. As I wrote in my first book,

The change in the alphabet...simplified language processing software. Before 1994, software routines that relied on alphabetical order needed to make exceptions for Spanish, since all Spanish words with c were alphabetized before those with ch, and likewise for l and ll. For example, culebra ‘snake’ was considered alphabetically prior to chico ‘boy,’ and luchar ‘to fight’ prior to llano ‘flat, plain’—a bizarre phenomenon from a non-Spanish perspective. With ch and ll eliminated as separate letters, Spanish no longer required special computational handling. [From Question #45, "What happened to ch and ll?"]

The question remains: why was rr never treated like a letter in the first place? I don’t know (maybe some reader does), but I have a theory. In written Spanish, words can begin with any consonant, and also with ch or ll, but not with rr. Because a single r at the beginning of a word is pronounced as a trill, there would be no difference between, say, rojo ‘red’ and a hypothetical rrojo. In this sense the ch and ll digraphs were more salient than rr. Surely this is why they were added to the alphabet.

Puerto Rican r

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[This is the English version of an earlier post in Spanish (in celebration of “Spanish Friday”).]

I’ve previously written about several aspects of the Spanish r sound: its pronunciation and linguistic identify, its origin, and the difficulties that some adults (and many kids) have pronouncing it. Today we’ll consider a dialectal variation, the r of Puerto Rico.


In parts of Puerto Rico, it’s common to hear a French-style, back-of-the tongue, unusually long r in place of the normal Spanish trill. Puerto Ricans see this pronunciation as a distinctive marker of island identity, and therefore a source of either shame or pride — or both. Author Magali García Ramis described this love/hate relationship in her essay “My Father’s R”. This was her inaugural lecture when she was inducted into the Academia Puertorriqueña de la Lengua Española in 2009, and is also the title essay of her 2011 book:

 

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La erre de Puerto Rico (Puerto Rican r)

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En celebración de “Spanish Friday” este aporte es en español. [In celebration of “Spanish Friday”, this post is in Spanish (English translation will be posted separately)].

Les presento hoy un aporte más sobre la erre española. Ya colgué un aporte sobre su pronunciación e identidad, uno sobre su origen latino, y uno sobre las dificultades que tienen unas personas pronunciándola. Hoy consideramos una variación dialectal, la erre de Puerto Rico.

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Pity the Spanish speaker who can’t roll his r’s

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In two excruciating posts (here and here), Madrid blogger Andrés Adrover Kvamsdal described his months-long quest to master his native language’s trilled r sound, a journey that involved surgery followed by months of daily speech therapy. It’s clear from the responses to these posts that Sr. Adrover isn’t alone.

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Why Spanish has two r sounds

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In a previous post, I described the two r sounds of Spanish — the trill of carro and the flap of caro — and why linguists think r is interesting. How did Spanish end up with these two different flavors of r?

The spelling of carro and caro us a strong hint: Latin had both long and short r, along with long and short versions of other consonants. The difference between Latin carrus and carus wasn’t how the r sounds were made, but how long they were held. Spanish did away with the length difference but compensated by introducing the trill/flap difference.

This is consistent with a larger pattern: except for long mm versus short m, which simply merged, Spanish found a substitute for all of Latin’s consonant length contrasts. My favorite other example is Latin’s long nn, which turned into Spanish ñ , as in año “year” (from Latin annus).

Any changes to long consonants generally also applied to short consonants at the beginning of a word. This explains why words beginning with r (like real) are trilled, even though they had a short r in Latin and are still spelled with a single r.

An /r/ is an /r/ is an /r/

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If you speak Spanish, then you probably already know that it has two r sounds: the trill of carro “cart, car” and the light flap or tap of caro “expensive”. In both sounds, the tip of the tongue makes light contact with the roof of the mouth just behind the front teeth. In the trill, the tongue vibrates–at an average speed of 25 vibrations per second!–as air passes forcefully though the mouth. The flap is similar to the American English pronunciation of d as in rider. In fact, I’ve taught native Spanish speakers who misspell it as d.

You can see animations of both r types here; click on “vibrantes”.

Although both the trill and the flap seem exotic to English speakers, they are much more common world-wide than the gliding English r. This is one of the many cases where something that appears unusual about Spanish turns out to be something unusual about English. (Perhaps commenters will suggest more examples?) It’s also fairly common for languages to have two or more r sounds.

What fascinates linguists about r, in Spanish and elsewhere, is the simple fact that it has so many variations. Every other sound is defined by where and how it’s pronounced. But r can be articulated either in the front of the mouth (as in Spanish), in the back (Hebrew, French, German), or in between (English). The tongue’s movement in making the sound also varies, including trills, flap, and glides. This heterogeneity makes r a most curious critter!

For this reason, linguists generally define r—and only r—as a group of sounds that play a recognizable role in language regardless of their specific articulation. For example, any version of r can act as a buffer between a vowel and another consonant, as in both the Spanish and English versions of the phrase truco de cartas “card trick.” Members of the r group are also interconnected in language evolution, borrowing, and learning. Thus the front-of-the-mouth r of Latin real evolved into the back-of-the-mouth trill of French reel, which was borrowed into English as the mid-mouth glide of real, which interferes when English-speaking students try to pronounce the front-of-the-mouth trill of Spanish real. An r is an r is an r.