Trill consonants included in the
International Phonetic Alphabet: • –
Voiced bilabial trill • –
Voiceless bilabial trill • –
Voiced alveolar trill • –
Voiceless alveolar trill • –
Voiced retroflex trill • –
Voiceless retroflex trill • –
Voiced uvular trill • –
Voiceless uvular trill • –
Voiced epiglottal trill • –
Voiceless epiglottal trill In addition, • –
Velopharyngeal trill; the
velopharyngeal fricative found in disordered speech sometimes involves trilling of the velopharyngeal port, producing a 'snort'. The bilabial trill is uncommon. The coronal trill is most frequently
alveolar , but
dental and
postalveolar articulations and also occur. An alleged
retroflex trill found in
Toda has been transcribed (that is, the same as the
retroflex flap), but might be less ambiguously written , as only the onset is retroflex, with the actual trill being alveolar. The epiglottal trills are identified by the IPA as fricatives, with the trilling assumed to be
allophonic. However, analyzing the sounds as trills may be more economical. There are also so-called
strident vowels which are accompanied by epiglottal trill. The cells in the IPA chart for the
velar,
(upper) pharyngeal, and
glottal places of articulation are shaded as impossible. The glottis quite readily vibrates, but this occurs as the
phonation of vowels and consonants, not as a consonant of its own. Dorso-palatal and velar vibratory motions of the tongue are occasionally produced, especially during the release of dorsal stops, and
ingressive velar trills occur in snoring, but not in normal speech. The upper pharyngeal tract cannot reliably produce a trill, but the epiglottis does, and epiglottal trills are pharyngeal in the broad sense. A partially devoiced uvular or pre-uvular (i.e. between velar and uvular) trill with some frication occurs as a
coda allophone of in the
Limburgish dialects of
Maastricht and
Weert. Voiceless trills occur phonemically in e.g.
Welsh and
Icelandic. (See also
voiceless alveolar trill,
voiceless retroflex trill,
voiceless uvular trill.) Mangbetu and
Ninde have phonemically voiceless bilabial trills. The
Czech language has two contrastive alveolar trills, one a fricative trill (written
ř in the orthography). In the fricative trill the tongue is raised, so that there is audible
frication during the trill, sounding a little like a simultaneous and (or and when devoiced). A symbol for this sound, , has been dropped from the IPA, and it is now generally transcribed as a raised
r, .
Nuosu Yi has two labiodental fricativized vowels (phonemically , with the underline indicating tenseness) in which the initial fricative elements are often realized as voiceless or voiced bilabial trills following bilabial and alveolar plosives; both the lax and tense variants may be either type of voicing, depending on the context. A number of languages have
trilled affricates such as and . The
Chapacuran languages Wariʼ,
Itene, and
Oro Win, as well as the
Naga language Sangtam, have a very unusual trilled phoneme, a
voiceless bilabially post-trilled dental stop, . A nasal trill has been described from some dialects of Romanian, and is posited as an intermediate historical step in
rhotacism. However, the phonetic variation of the sound is considerable, and it is not clear how frequently it is actually trilled. In
Inor, can mutate to , often when prefixes are attached to words beginning with , resulting in nasal
vowel-consonant harmony. Despite these examples, no language is known to contrast phonemically. == Paralinguistic trills ==