The voiced bilabial trill is a type of

consonant In articulatory phonetics, a consonant is a speech sound that is articulated with complete or partial closure of the vocal tract, except for the h sound, which is pronounced without any stricture in the vocal tract. Examples are and pronou ...

al sound, used in some spoken

language Language is a structured system of communication that consists of grammar and vocabulary. It is the primary means by which humans convey meaning, both in spoken and signed language, signed forms, and may also be conveyed through writing syste ...

s. The symbol in the

International Phonetic Alphabet The International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) is an alphabetic system of phonetic notation based primarily on the Latin script. It was devised by the International Phonetic Association in the late 19th century as a standard written representation ...

that represents the sound is , a small capital version of the Latin letter b, and the equivalent

X-SAMPA The Extended Speech Assessment Methods Phonetic Alphabet (X-SAMPA) is a variant of SAMPA developed in 1995 by John C. Wells, professor of phonetics at University College London. It is designed to unify the individual language SAMPA alphabets, and ...

symbol is B\.

Features

Features of the voiced bilabial trill: In most instances, it is only found as the trilled release of a prenasalized stop.

Varieties

Occurrences

The Knorkator song " uchstabe (the actual title is a

glyph A glyph ( ) is any kind of purposeful mark. In typography, a glyph is "the specific shape, design, or representation of a character". It is a particular graphical representation, in a particular typeface, of an element of written language. A ...

) on the 1999 album '' Hasenchartbreaker'' uses a similar sound (though linguolabial instead of bilabial) to replace "br" in a number of German words (e.g. for ).

Prenasalized

Prestopped trills and stops with trill release

Phonology

In many of the languages in which the bilabial trill occurs, it occurs only as part of a prenasalized bilabial stop with trilled release, . That developed historically from a prenasalized stop before a relatively high

back vowel A back vowel is any in a class of vowel sound used in spoken languages. The defining characteristic of a back vowel is that the highest point of the tongue is positioned relatively back in the mouth without creating a constriction that would be c ...

like . In such instances, the sounds are usually still limited to the environment of a following . However, the trills in Mangbetu may precede any vowelSee, e.g., among the numerous data of Robert G. McKee's "Concerning Meegye and Mangbetu’s bilabial trills," in Advances in Nilo-Saharan Linguistics: Proceedings of the 8th Nilo-Saharan Linguistics Colloquium, University of Hamburg, August 22–25, 2001, Doris L. Payne & Mechthild Reh (eds.), 181–189 (2007, Rüdiger Köppe Verlag, Cologne). and are sometimes preceded by only a nasal.

Notes

References

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External links

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Oro Win recordings
{{IPA navigation Trill consonants Bilabial consonants Pulmonic consonants Oral consonants