R - Usage

Usage

See also: Rhotic consonant, R-colored vowel, and Guttural R

In science, the letter R is a symbol for the gas constant. Mathematicians use R or (an R in blackboard bold, displayed as ℝ in Unicode) for the set of all real numbers.

R represents a rhotic consonant in many languages, as shown in the table below. The International Phonetic Alphabet uses several variations of the letter to represent the different rhotic consonants; represents the alveolar trill.

Alveolar trill Listen some dialects of British English or in emphatic speech, standard Dutch, Finnish, Galician, German in some dialects, Hungarian, Icelandic, Italian, Czech, Lithuanian, Latvian, Latin, Norwegian, Polish, Catalan, Portuguese (traditional form), Romanian, Scots, Spanish and Albanian 'rr', Swedish, Welsh
Alveolar approximant Listen English (most varieties), Dutch in some Dutch dialects (in specific positions of words), Swedish, Faroese, Sicilian
Alveolar flap / Alveolar tap Listen Portuguese, Catalan, Spanish and Albanian 'r', Turkish, Dutch, Italian, Venetian, Galician, Leonese
Voiced retroflex fricative Listen Spanish used as an allophone of /r/ in some South American accents; Standard Chinese (in pinyin); Vietnamese (southern dialects)
Retroflex approximant Listen some varieties of American English; Standard Chinese (in pinyin); and Gutnish
Retroflex flap Listen sometimes in Scottish English
Uvular trill Listen German stage standard; some Dutch dialects (in Brabant and Limburg, and some city dialects in The Netherlands), Swedish in Southern Sweden, Norwegian in western and southern parts
Voiced uvular fricative Listen German, Danish, French, standard European Portuguese 'rr', standard Brazilian Portuguese 'rr', Puerto Rican Spanish 'rr' and 'r-'.

Other languages may use the letter r in their alphabets (or Latin transliterations schemes) to represent rhotic consonants different from the alveolar trill. In Haitian Creole, it represents a sound so weak that it is often written interchangeably with w, e.g. Kweyol for Kreyol.

Brazilian Portuguese has a great number of allophones of /ʁ/ such as, and, the latter three ones can be used only in certain contexts ( and as 'rr'; in the syllable coda, as an allophone of /ɾ/ according to the European Portuguese norm and /ʁ/ according to the Brazilian Portuguese norm). Usually at least two of them are present in a single dialect, such as Rio de Janeiro's, and, for a few speakers, .

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Famous quotes containing the word usage:

    I am using it [the word ‘perceive’] here in such a way that to say of an object that it is perceived does not entail saying that it exists in any sense at all. And this is a perfectly correct and familiar usage of the word.
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    ...Often the accurate answer to a usage question begins, “It depends.” And what it depends on most often is where you are, who you are, who your listeners or readers are, and what your purpose in speaking or writing is.
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