OLCreate: Teaching Spanish Pronunciation: Rhotics (vibrantes)

Teaching Spanish Pronunciation
5. Spanish and English consonants contrasted
5.5. Rhotics (vibrantes)
Spanish has two rhotics; a simple voiced alveolar tap /ɾ/ (vibrante simple) and a voiced alveolar trill /r/ (vibrante múltiple), as in pero (but) and perro (dog). The tap is produced with a single swift contact of the tip of the tongue, while the trill is produced with several such quick contacts. The tap is similar to the Scottish pronunciation of r in words like three or curd. Although pronouncing an alveolar approximant (English r) is a noticeable sign of a foreign accent, it is still worth explaining to your students that they should not worry about rolling their r’s as long as they don’t “swallow” them.
In most British dialects, r in syllable-final position is not pronounced; morning, car. This is an automatic process, so often English speakers are not aware of carrying this phonological rule over to Spanish and might pronounce amó (he loved) and amor (love) in the same way. It requires a good deal of practice not to drop coda r’s.
Tap or trill?
The distribution of the two rhotics in Spanish is quite special. While they are contrastive in intervocalic
OpenLearn Create
Explore
Create & Manage
Except for third party materials and otherwise stated, content on this site is
made available under Creative Commons licences. OpenLearn Create is powered by a number
of software tools released under the GNU GPL.