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R-colored vowel

Phonetic sound in some languages

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R-colored vowels are exceedingly rare, occurring in less than one percent of all languages. However, they occur in two of the most widely spoken languages: North American English and many varieties of Mandarin Chinese. In North American English, they are found in words such as dollar, butter, third, color, and nurse. They also occur in Canadian French, some varieties of Portuguese, some Jutlandic dialects of Danish, and in a few indigenous languages of the Americas and of Asia, including Serrano and Yurok in the United States, Luobohe Miao in China, Katë in Afghanistan, and Badaga in India.

Transcription practices

In the IPA, an r-colored vowel is indicated by a hook diacritic ⟨⟩ placed to the right of the regular symbol for the vowel. For example, the IPA symbol for schwa is ⟨⟩, while the IPA symbol for an r-colored schwa is ⟨⟩. Similarly, the IPA symbol for the open-mid central unrounded vowel is ⟨⟩, while an r-colored open-mid central unrounded vowel is ⟨⟩. This diacritic is the hook of ⟨⟩ or ⟨⟩, symbols constructed by John Samuel Kenyon along with ⟨⟩ by adding the retroflex hook (right hook) to ⟨⟩ and ⟨⟩. Both ⟨⟩ and ⟨⟩ were proposed as IPA symbols by the editors of American Speech in 1939 to distinguish it from .

The IPA adopted several ways to transcribe r-colored vowels in its 1947 chart: the turned r ⟨⟩; the superscript turned r ⟨⟩, ⟨⟩, ⟨⟩, ⟨⟩, etc.; the retroflex hook ⟨⟩, ⟨⟩, ⟨⟩, ⟨⟩, etc.; and added ⟨⟩ as a variant of ⟨⟩ in its 1951 chart. In 1976 the retroflex hook was dropped due to insufficient usage. In 1989, at the Kiel Convention, the hook of ⟨⟩ and ⟨⟩ was adopted as a diacritic placed on the right side of the vowel symbol for r-colored vowels, e.g. ⟨⟩. Following the convention of alternating ⟨⟩ and ⟨⟩ for non-rhotic accents, in some English adaptations of IPA, ⟨⟩ and ⟨⟩ signify stressed and unstressed, respectively, rather than a difference in phonetic quality. The use of the superscript turned r () is still commonly seen.

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