Pronunciation

Rolled, Uvular or Neither? How the R Is Made

Whether you pronounce the R in “car” is one question; how you make the R in “red” is a different one. English uses an approximant, made without the tongue touching anything, which is unusual. Spanish and Italian tap or roll it, French and German make it at the back of the throat, and traditional Scottish English taps it too.

The question, as everyone in the survey sees it

How do you make the R at the start of “red”?

This is about how the R is made, not whether you pronounce it at the end of “car”.

Answer it yourself and see where you land on the map →

Which accents do what

Each accent profile in the survey has an expected answer to this question. Where a profile allows more than one answer, the region genuinely varies.

The tongue does not touch anything

In these profiles, an approximant R, made without contact.

A tap or a roll of the tongue tip

In these profiles, a tapped or trilled R.

From the back of the throat

In these profiles, a uvular R, made at the back of the throat.

  • French-accented English
  • German-accented English
  • Brazilian Portuguese-accented English

Why this question is in the survey

Pronunciation questions carry more weight in the scoring than vocabulary questions do, because they are much harder to change deliberately. People move house and pick up new words; the vowel system learned in childhood tends to stay. Every answer is stored with a coarse map cell for the town you grew up in, and a region is coloured in once at least five people there have answered.

See the full question bank, the accent profiles these answers feed, or how the scoring works.