Tap and flap consonants

Tap vs. flap

Many linguists use the terms tap and flap interchangeably. Peter Ladefoged proposed for a while that it might be useful to distinguish between them. He said that a tap strikes its point of contact directly (as a very brief stop) but a flap strikes the point of contact tangentially (since the flap passes by along its trajectory). However, his usage was inconsistent and contradicted itself in his other books, even between different editions of the same text.

Siniša Spajić, Peter Ladefoged, and P. Bhaskararao, in their paper The Trills of Toda, proposed a similar version of the distinction, with an extra description for flaps: "Flaps are most typically made by retracting the tongue tip behind the alveolar ridge and moving it forward so that it strikes the ridge in passing." Later in the paper, however, the term flap is used in all cases. Subsequent work on the labiodental flap has clarified the issue: flaps involve retraction of the active articulator, and a forward-striking movement.

For linguists who do not make the tap vs. flap distinction, alveolars are typically called taps, and other articulations are called flaps.

A few languages have been reported to contrast a tap and a flap (as in the proposed definition cited above) at the same place of articulation. This is the case for Norwegian, in which the alveolar apical tap and the post-alveolar/retroflex apical flap have the same place of articulation for some speakers, and Kamviri, which also has both an apical alveolar tap ('upward' r) and an apical alveolar flap ('forward' ṛ).

IPA symbols

The tap and flap consonants identified by the International Phonetic Alphabet are:

The Kiel Convention of the IPA recommended that for other taps and flaps, a homorganic consonant, such as a stop or trill, should be used with a breve diacritic:

Tap or flaps: where no independent symbol for a tap is provided, the breve diacritic should be used, e.g. or .

However, the former could be mistaken for a short trill, and is more clearly transcribed ⟨⟩, whereas for a nasal tap the unambiguous transcription ⟨⟩ is generally used.

Types of taps and flaps

Alveolar taps and flaps

Spanish features a good illustration of an alveolar flap, contrasting it with a trill: pero "but" vs. perro "dog". Among the Germanic languages, the tap allophone occurs in American and Australian English and in Northern Low Saxon. In American and Australian English it tends to be an allophone of intervocalic and , leading to homophonous pairs such as "metal" / "medal" and "latter" / "ladder" – see tapping. In a number of Low Saxon dialects it occurs as an allophone of intervocalic or ; e.g. bäden /beeden/ → 'to pray', 'to request', gah to Bedde! /gaa tou bede/ → 'go to bed!', Water /vaater/ → 'water', Vadder /fater/ → 'father'. (In some dialects this has resulted in reanalysis and a shift to ; thus bären , to Berre , Warer , Varrer .) Occurrence varies; in some Low Saxon dialects it affects both and , while in others it affects only . Other languages with this are Portuguese, Korean, and Austronesian languages with .

In Galician, Portuguese and Sardinian, a flap often appears instead of a former . This is part of a wider phenomenon called rhotacism.

Retroflex flaps

Most Indic and Dravidian languages have retroflex flaps. In Hindi there are three, a simple retroflex flap as in big, a murmured retroflex flap as in leper, and a retroflex nasal flap in the Hindicized pronunciation of Sanskrit gem. Some of these may be allophonic.

A retroflex flap is also common in Norwegian dialects and some Swedish dialects.

Lateral taps and flaps

Many of the languages of Africa, Asia, and the Pacific that do not distinguish from may have a lateral flap. However, it is also possible that many of these languages do not have a lateral–central contrast at all, so that even a consistently neutral articulation may be perceived as sometimes lateral or , sometimes central . This has been suggested to be the case for Japanese, for example.

The Iwaidja language of Australia has both alveolar and retroflex lateral flaps. These contrast with lateral approximants at the same positions, as well as a retroflex tap , alveolar tap , and retroflex approximant . However, the flapped, or tapped, laterals in Iwaidja are distinct from 'lateral flaps' as represented by the corresponding IPA symbols (see below). These phones consist of a flap component followed by a lateral component, whereas In Iwaidja the opposite is the case. For this reason, current IPA transcriptions of these sounds by linguists working on the language consist of an alveolar lateral followed by a superscript alveolar tap and a retroflex lateral followed by a superscript retroflex tap.

According to Ladefoged & Maddieson (1996), intervocalic occurrences of velar laterals in the Kanite and Melpa languages of New Guinea may be very brief, and as such may be called velar lateral taps.

An alveolar–labiolingual lateral 'double flap' or has been reported to exist in Pirahã as a special speech-register allophone of , in which the tongue strikes the alveolar ridge and then strikes the lower lip; it is a phonetic cluster that has "two, non-contiguous, non-simultaneous points of articulation".

Non-coronal flaps

The only common non-coronal flap is the labiodental flap, found throughout central Africa in languages such as Margi. In 2005, the IPA adopted a right-hook v, ⟨⟩:

Previously it had been transcribed with the use of the breve diacritic, , or other ad hoc symbols.

Other taps or flaps are much less common. They include an epiglottal tap; a bilabial flap in Banda, which may be an allophone of the labiodental flap; a velar lateral tap as an allophone in Kanite and Melpa; and a uvular tap as an allophone in several languages. These are often transcribed with the breve diacritic, as . Note here that, like a velar trill, a central velar flap or tap is not possible because the tongue and soft palate cannot move together easily enough to produce a sound.

If other flaps are found, the breve diacritic could be used to represent them, but would more properly be combined with the symbol for the corresponding voiced stop. A palatal tap or flap, which unlike a velar tap (see below) is believed to be articulatorily possible, could be represented this way (by ).

Though deemed impossible on the IPA chart, a velar tap has been reported to occur allophonically in the Kamviri dialect of the Kamkata-vari language and in Dàgáárè as a realization of (one study claims the latter could be a palatal tap in some realizations, though this is not directly attested).

Nasal taps and flaps

Nasalized consonants include taps and flaps, although these are rarely phonemic. In conversational (rather than carefully enunciated) speech, American English often features a nasal flap when /n/ or /nt/ are in intervocalic position before an unstressed vowel; for example, "winner" and "winter" become homophones: ['wɪ^(~)ɾ̃ɚ]. Many West African languages have a nasal flap (or ) as an allophone of before a nasal vowel; Pashto, however, has a phonemic nasal retroflex lateral flap. As mentioned above, many Indo-Aryan languages also possess a phonemic retroflex nasal flap that contrasts with the alveolar nasal stop.

Tapped fricatives

Voiced and voiceless tapped alveolar fricatives have been reported from a few languages. Flapped fricatives are possible but do not seem to be used. See voiced alveolar tapped fricative, voiceless alveolar tapped fricative.