Czech Ř is the 28th letter of the
Czech alphabet. In the
Czech language ř is used to denote , a
raised alveolar non-sonorant trill. Its manner of articulation is similar to other alveolar trills but the tongue is raised; it is partially
fricative. It is usually
voiced, , but it also has a voiceless allophone occurring in the vicinity of voiceless consonants or at the end of a word. In the early 15th century work
De orthographia bohemica, attributed to
Jan Hus, the letter ṙ is introduced. The dot
diacritic above the letter gradually had various forms, which eventually became the modern ř.
Upper Sorbian Ř is a letter in the
Upper Sorbian alphabet. In the
Upper Sorbian language it denotes the
voiceless postalveolar fricative . The letter does not appear in the orthography of
Lower Sorbian.
Silesian The letter is present in a proposed alphabet for
Silesian, the , created in 2006. The alphabet was created with the goal of limiting the use of
digraphs as much as possible, by replacing them with single characters. Ř had also been proposed in an orthography presented in 2001 by Piotr Kalinowski and Józef Kulisz, being used instead of the Polish digraph ⟨rz⟩ ; this was done with the intention of emphasizing the separateness of Silesian from Polish. The writing system was only used in a few short internet entries of both codifiers. The letter was also used in a project by the linguist , presented in 2008, which was meant to reflect the phonetic diversity of the entire Silesian-speaking region by assigning letters to sounds heard only in some areas; ř represented the fricative trill of
Cieszyn Silesian, like in Czech. The system did not attract much interest and is known only from the text of her paper.
Romani It is used by academics and activists to represent the
Romani language's second
rhotic retained in some dialects (which is also commonly spelled as ⟨rr⟩), variously pronounced as a long trill , a
uvular trill , or a
retroflex tap or
approximant .
Piemontese Ř is a letter used in some varieties of
Piemontese. It is used to indicate an that tends towards (the ‘rounded’ r), typical of the
Langhe,
Monferrato and
Mondovì areas and some neighbouring areas of
Liguria. On some non-technical websites it is represented with the wrong glyph ȓ.
Katë It is used in
Katë by academics to represent the
voiced retroflex approximant found in all dialects, which has several allophonic realizations, including the
R-colored vowel.
Kurdish In some
Latin-based scripts of
Kurdish, it represents the
voiced alveolar trill , as opposed to the
alveolar tap represented by ⟨r⟩.
Americanist notation In
Americanist phonetic notation, ř has been used to represent a
flap. This usage might come from
William A. Smalley in
Manual of Articulatory Phonetics (1963).
Berber The letter is used in scholarly transcriptions of
Riffian Berber. It represents a sound that comes from historical *l; in most Riffian dialects it is distinguished from r by its lack of influence on nearby vowels, however in some dialects this contrast is strengthened either by ř being trilled and r being a
tap, or by ř being
palatalized and r not being palatalized. Ř is a
rhotic approximant or
fricative in some dialects.
Hausa In
Paul Newman's transcription of
Hausa (seen in
A History of the Hausa Language), it is used to represent the trill, as opposed to the
flap represented by r. The contrast between the two is marginal in the modern language, but the distinction is important for tracing the phonological history of Hausa.
IPA Lowercase ř is an
obsolete symbol of the
International Phonetic Alphabet, used as of 1912 and 1926. It represented the
apicoalveolar fricative trill (as in Czech). The symbol was replaced by ɼ, a long-legged r, which was rarely used for a few decades before being retired in 1989. The sound is now represented by .
Umbrian In transliterations of the native alphabet of the extinct
Umbrian language, ř is used to designate a sound of unknown quality, generally deriving from earlier intervocalic *d (and also from intervocalic *l that preceded a
front vowel). The same sound was represented in the Latin alphabet by the sequence ⟨rs⟩. == Encodings ==