Flap consonant
| Manners of articulation |
| Nasal |
| Plosive |
| Fricative |
| Affricate |
| Lateral |
| Approximant |
| Semivowel |
| Liquid |
| Flap/Tap |
| Trill |
| Ejective |
| Implosive |
| Click |
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In phonetics, a flap or tap is a type of consonantal sound, which is produced with a single contraction of the muscles so that one articulator is thrown against another. The main difference between a flap and a stop consonant is that in a flap, there is no buildup of air pressure behind the place of articulation.
The difference between a tap and a flap is that in a tap the tongue flips up to strike its point of contact, like a very light plosive, whereas with a flap the tongue is thrown out and down, striking the point of contact in passing. For linguists that make a distinction between the two, the tap is transcribed as a "fish-hook ar", [ɾ], while the flap is transcribed as a small capital dee, [ᴅ] (which however is not recognized by the IPA). However, no language contrasts a tap and a flap at the same point of articulation, so the terms are used loosely.
The flap and tap consonants identified by the International Phonetic Alphabet are:
| IPA | Description | Example | |||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Language | Orthography | IPA | Meaning | ||
| ɽ | retroflex flap | Warlpiri | dupa (?) | /ɽupa/ | "windbreak" |
| ɾ | alveolar flap | North American English | latter | /læɾɚ/ | "latter" |
| ɺ | alveolar lateral flap | Japanese | ラーメン | /ɺaːmeɴ/ | "ramen" |
Lateral flaps may actually be quite common. Many languages of Africa, Asia, and the Pacific that don't distinguish r from l may actually have a lateral flap, but this is generally missed by European linguists, who aren't often familiar with the sound. Also, many languages do not have a lateral-central contrast at all, so that even a consistently neutral articulation may be perceived as sometimes lateral, sometimes central.
The Iwaidja language of Australia has both alveolar and retroflex lateral flaps, and perhaps a palatal lateral flap as well. (However, the latter may instead be a palatalized alveolar lateral flap.) These contrast with lateral approximants at the same positions, as well as a central retroflex flap [ɽ], alveolar trill [r], and alveolar approximant [ɹ].
The symbol for the alveolar lateral flap is the basis for the expected (though not officially recognized) symbol for the retroflex lateral flap,
Missing image
Lateral_flaps.png
Image:Lateral flaps.png
Non-rhotic flaps are much less common. They may include a bilabial flap (in Banda) and a labiodental flap (in Margi, Kera, et al.), which may be allophones of a single phoneme. There are no recognized IPA symbols for these sounds. When described in the literature, they are often transcribed with the ad hoc diacritics [w̆, v̆]. The labiodental has also been given a dedicated symbol by some researchers,
Missing image
Labial_flap.png
Image:Labial flap.png
Symbols such as these are uncommon, but are becoming more frequent now that font-editing software has become accessible. Note however that as well as not being sanctioned by the IPA, there are no Unicode values for them.