Guttural R - Romance Languages - French

French

The French language is perhaps the best known example of a language with a guttural rhotic, to the extent that this pronunciation is widely stereotyped. While there are a wide range of realizations – the uvular trill, the uvular fricatives and (the latter also realized as an approximant), the alveolar trill, the alveolar tap, will all be recognized as the phoneme /r/ – most of them will be considered dialectal. For example, was once typical of a working class Parisian accent, while is sometimes found in southern France, as well as increasingly less in North America..

Today in northern France, /r/ is commonly pronounced as a voiced or voiceless uvular fricative . is also the most common pronunciation in the French media. In much of southern France this guttural R has replaced the traditional alveolar trill which can now only be heard among the oldest persons.

It is not known when the guttural rhotic entered the French language, although it may have become commonplace in the mid or late eighteenth century. Molière's Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme, written in the seventeenth century, has a professor describe the sound of /r/ as an alveolar trill.

Rural Quebec French as well as Quebec French from older generations generally use an alveolar trill, as was traditionally the pronunciation in Western Quebec (including Montreal) and other parts of Canada, and as such this older pronunciation feature must have been retained after the French colonists in Canada were isolated from "Mother France."

French Canadian broadcasters as well as Quebec's urbanites, however, have adopted the modern guttural rhotic pronunciation of Paris perhaps as the result of influence by modern French media from France.

Generally speaking, classical choral and operatic French pronunciation requires the use of an alveolar trill when singing, since an alveolar trill is easier to project than any guttural sound, be it a uvular trill or a uvular fricative.