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R, or r, is the eighteenth letter of the Latin alphabet, used in the English alphabet, the alphabets of other western European languages and others worldwide. Its name in English is ar (pronounced ), plural ars."R", Oxford English Dictionary 2nd edition (1989); "ar", op. cit
The letter is the eighth most common letter in English and the fourth-most common consonant, after , , and .
In Hiberno-English, the letter is called or , somewhat similar to oar, ore, orr.
The letter ⟨R⟩ is sometimes referred to as the littera canīna 'canine letter', often rendered in English as the dog's letter. This Latin term referred to the Latin that was Trill consonant to sound like a growling dog, a spoken style referred to as vōx canīna 'dog voice' (e.g. in Spanish perro 'dog').
It developed into Greek ῥῶ () and Latin . The descending diagonal stroke develops as a graphic variant in some Western Greek alphabets (writing rho as ⟨⟩), but it was not adopted in most Old Italic alphabets; most Old Italic alphabets show variants of their rho between a and a shape, but without the Western Greek descending stroke. Indeed, the oldest known forms of the Latin alphabet itself of the 7th to 6th centuries BC, in the Duenos and the Forum inscription, still write using the shape of the letter. The Lapis Satricanus inscription shows the form of the Latin alphabet around 500 BC. Here, the rounded, closing ⟨Π⟩ shape of the and the shape of the have become difficult to distinguish. The descending stroke of the Latin letter has fully developed by the 3rd century BC, as seen in the Tomb of the Scipios sarcophagus inscriptions of that era. From , the letter would be written with its loop fully closed, assuming the shape formerly taken by .
In handwriting, it was common not to close the bottom of the loop but continue into the leg, saving an extra pen stroke. The loop-leg stroke shortened into the simple arc used in the Carolingian minuscule and until today.
A calligraphic minuscule , known as r rotunda , was used in the sequence , bending the shape of the to accommodate the bulge of the as in , as opposed to . Later, the same variant was also used where followed other lower case letters with a rounded loop towards the right, such as with , , , as well as to write the geminate as . Use of r rotunda was mostly tied to blackletter typefaces, and the glyph fell out of use along with blackletter fonts in English language contexts mostly by the 18th century.
Insular script used a minuscule which retained two downward strokes, but which did not close the loop, known as the Insular r ; this variant survives in the Gaelic type popular in Ireland until the mid-20th century, but has become largely limited to a decorative function.
| + Pronunciation of by language ! Orthography ! Phonemes |
represents a [[rhotic consonant]] in English, such as the alveolar approximant (most varieties), [[alveolar trill]] (some British varieties), or the retroflex approximant (some varieties in the [[United States|American English]], South West England and [[Dublin|Hiberno-English]]).
In non-rhotic accents, it is not pronounced in certain positions, but can affect the pronunciation of the vowel that precedes it.
R is the letter frequency in the English language.
represents a [[rhotic consonant]] in many languages, as shown in the table below.
| Alveolar trill | Standard Dutch language, Estonian, Finnish language, Galician, German language in some dialects, Hungarian, Icelandic, Indonesian, Italian language, Czech language, Javanese, Lithuanian, Latvian language, Latin language, Norwegian mostly in the northwest, Polish language, Portuguese (traditional form), Romanian, Russian language, Scots language, Slovak language, Swedish language more frequent in northern and western dialects, as well as in Finland Swedish; Sundanese, Ukrainian, Welsh language; also Catalan language, Spanish language and Albanian | |
| Alveolar approximant | Dutch language in some Netherlandic dialects (in specific positions of words), Faroese language, Sicilian and Swedish language, especially when in weakly articulated positions, such as word-final | |
| Alveolar flap / Alveolar tap | Portuguese, Catalan language, Spanish language and Albanian ; Turkish language, Dutch language, Italian language, Venetian, Galician, Leonese language, Norwegian, Irish language, Swedish language and Māori | |
| Voiced retroflex fricative | Norwegian around Tromsø; Spanish language used as an allophone of /r/ in some South American accents; Swedish language especially in Central Swedish dialects, such as the dialect in/around Stockholm; Hopi language used before vowels, as in raana, "toad", from Spanish rana | |
| Retroflex approximant | Gutnish; Pinyin transliteration of Standard Chinese | |
| Retroflex flap | Norwegian when followed by ⟨d⟩; Scottish English on occasion; Swedish language when followed by ⟨d⟩ | |
| Uvular trill | German language stage standard; some Dutch language dialects (in Brabant and Limburgish, and some city dialects in the Netherlands); Swedish language in southern Sweden; Norwegian in western and southern parts; Venetian only in the Venice area. | |
| Voiced uvular fricative | North Mesopotamian Arabic, Judeo-Iraqi Arabic, German language, Danish language, French language, standard European Portuguese , standard Brazilian Portuguese , Puerto Rican Spanish and 'r-' in western parts; Norwegian in western and southern parts; Swedish language in southern dialects |
Other languages may use the letter in their alphabets (or Latin transliteration 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 , e.g. 'Kweyol' for 'Kreyol'.
The doubled represents a trilled in Albanian, Aragonese, Asturian, Basque language, Catalan language and Spanish language.
Brazilian Portuguese has a great number of allophones of , such as , , , , , and . The latter three ones can be used only in certain contexts ( and as ; in the syllable coda, as an allophone of according to the European Portuguese norm and 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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