COLLECTION:
RHOTICS IN
Word-initial rhotic avoidance:
a typological survey
PHONOLOGICAL
THEORY
RESEARCH
LAURENCE LABRUNE
*Author affiliations can be found in the back matter of this article
ABSTRACT
CORRESPONDING AUTHOR:
Laurence Labrune
This paper addresses the issue of word-initial rhotic avoidance (WIRA) from a
typological point of view. Its first aim is to document WIRA cross-linguistically, based
on the examination of a sample of 200 languages designed by the WALS (Dryer and
Haspelmath 2013). This set of 200 languages has been surveyed in order to reveal
rhotic (and more generally liquid) phonotactic patterns in relation to word-initial
avoidance. On the basis of this survey, the paper identifies two types of WIRA: i)
phonological, or emic-WIRA; and ii) phonetic, or etic-WIRA. The first and most notable
result of this research is that 49% of all languages containing at least one phonemic
rhotic exhibit some degree of emic-WIRA, i.e, they possess no word or very few words
beginning phonologically with at least one of their rhotics in their native lexicon. The
paper also examines how word-initial rhotics are adapted from a non-WIRA language
into a WIRA language. The loanword adaptation data suggest that WIRA is a recessive
feature because no language in the sample has been observed to develop WIRA due
to language contact (although one exception, Gascon, has been identified outside of
the 200-language sample). Finally, the paper proposes two new universals in relation
to WIRA: 1) if a language forbids /l/ word-initially, it also forbids /r/; 2) a rhotic segment
never occurs as the positional allophone of a non-liquid segment word-initially.
Bordeaux Montaigne
University, 33600 Pessac
Cedex, FR
laurence.labrune@u-bordeauxmontaigne.fr
KEYWORDS:
liquid consonants; rhotics;
word-initial position;
phonotactics; phonological
typology; universals
TO CITE THIS ARTICLE:
Labrune, Laurence. 2021.
Word-initial rhotic avoidance:
a typological survey. Glossa:
a journal of general linguistics
6(1): 9. 1–19. DOI: https://doi.
org/10.5334/gjgl.922
1 INTRODUCTION
This paper addresses a feature which has been largely overlooked in typological phonological
research: the tendency of rhotic consonants not to occur in word-initial position. One very
frequently comes across pithy statements such as the following in descriptive books or papers:
(1)
a)
b)
c)
d)
e)
f)
g)
h)
i)
j)
“r cannot occur initially in any of the Barbacoan languages that have it as a
phoneme”, Curnow & Liddicoat (1998);
“/r/ does not occur initially in native Aymara”, Hardman (2001:17);
“all segmentals, except /r/, occur initially” in Haulapai (Hokan), Redden (1966);
“r never occurs word-initially” in Waskia (Trans-New Guinea), Barker (2009);
“/r/ no se registra nunca en posición initial” in Qawasqar (Alacalufan), Clairis (1987);
“No word may begin with r or l” in Hottentot/Khoisan, Greenberg (1966: 68);
“The vibrant /r/ is pronounced as a retroflexed voiced alveolar fricative wordinitially. Elsewhere it is pronounced as a flap like Spanish r” in Camsá (isolate),
Howard (1967);
“[r] is rare in initial position, especially so in non-loanwords” in Burushaski
(isolate), Anderson (1997: 1026);
/r/ is “initially phonotactically prohibited” in Chechen (Nakh-Daghestanian),
Nichols (1997: 966);
“la vibrante est absente en position initiale des lexèmes radicaux” in Susu
(Niger-Congo, Mande), Houis (1963: 27).
The starting point of this research, and its working hypothesis, is that such disparate reports
occur with greater than chance frequency and that they are therefore likely to reflect a general
tendency of the languages of the world, which deserves systematic and general attention.
The aim of this paper is to document word-initial rhotic avoidance (henceforth WIRA) crosslinguistically, with, ultimately, the more general purpose of investigating the reasons why
rhotics should constitute poor word initials from a phonological perspective. This paper
will focus on the first of these two issues. In section 4, it will present the results of a survey
conducted upon a sample of 200 languages (based on the World Atlas of Linguistic Structure,
Dryer & Haspelmath 2013) in order to investigate word-level rhotic distributional patterns in
relation to word-initial avoidance. In addition to providing descriptive statistical data, the paper
further identifies a number of representative patterns of WIRA which have been found to occur
across the sample. It also considers related issues such as the role of language contact and
loans in WIRA acquisition or inhibition within a language (Section 5). As a result of the close
investigation of the 200-language sample, the paper proposes two novel universals (section 6).
Finally, section 7 offers a conclusion and discusses a number of further issues.
But before entering the core part of this study, a number of terminological and methodological
issues need to be addressed. Dealing with 200 different languages implies a large amount of
heterogeneity in the data, and finding a common terminology and methodology proves to be
nearly an impossible task. A number of choices have been made in order to allow for a common
framework of analysis. These will be explained in Sections 2 and 3.
2 TERMINOLOGICAL ISSUES
2.1 DEFINING LIQUID AND RHOTIC CONSONANTS
The first terminological issue concerns the definition of liquid and rhotic consonants. These
terms are known to be difficult to define, even though there seems to be a commonly shared
intuition among phonologists over which type of segment belongs to these categories and
which does not. This issue has been discussed by a number of authors (most notably Lindau
1985; Labrune 1993; 2014; 2017; Ladefoged & Maddieson 1996; Walsh Dickey 1997; Proctor
2009; Wiese 2011; etc. See also the collection of papers in this volume).
Building on these previous studies, this paper adopts a traditional and conventional definition
of the term liquid. The class of liquids will be defined as including all the traditionally so-called
“l”-like and “r”-like sounds. They correspond to the API symbols shown in Table 1 (adapted from
Walsh Dickey 1997: 11, 14, but note that lateral affricates and the uvular voiceless fricative χ have
been excluded because they pattern more like obstruents than like sonorants. Note also that ʁ
is categorized as an approximant).
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laterals
Lateral approximants
DENTAL
ALVEOLAR
RETROFLEX
PALATAL
VELAR
l̪
l
ɭ
ʎ
ʟ
ɬ
Lateral fricatives
rhotics
UVULAR
ɮ
Trills
r̪
r
Taps or flaps
ɾ̪
ɾ
ɽ
ʀ
ʁ
Approximants
ɹ
ɻ
Lateral flap
ɺ
ɺ̣
If we remove all lateral segments from the Table 1, we obtain the list of rhotics. In this paper,
a rhotic will be defined as a non-lateral liquid segment which is proto-typically a tap, a flap,
or a trill articulated in the dental, alveolar or pre-palatal region (i.e. coronal), including the
retroflex place of articulation. The palatalized, velarized, glottalized, lateralized and voiceless
versions of these segments (all rare in the language sample) will also be labeled as rhotics.
Given this definition, any segment transcribed by means of the symbols r̪ ɾ̪ r ɾ ɺ ɺ̣ ɽ in the
language descriptions used for this survey (as well as their counterparts involving a secondary
articulation) will be automatically categorized as rhotic.
The two approximants ɹ and ɻ will also be included in the class. This choice may be disputable,
but note that only three languages of the sample (Diola-Fogny, English and Shipiho-Konibo)
have ɹ as the sole phonological rhotic of their system, and none has ɻ without having any other
rhotic.
The case of the uvulars /ʀ/ and /ʁ/ deserves special attention. The uvular trill ʀ and the voiced
approximant (or fricative) ʁ are reported to exist as phonemes in 12 languages of the sample.
In this paper, the inclusion of these two segments in the rhotic class will be system-dependent,
or conditional, which means that their categorization as rhotic or non-rhotic will depend on
their status within the phonological system that hosts them and shall be established on a caseby-case examination. The general principle is that when a language has a phonemic uvular trill
and/or a voiced uvular approximant in addition to one or several phonemic coronal rhotic(s),
these uvulars have not been included in the sub-inventory of rhotics. This is the case of Abipon,
Egyptian Arabic, Armenian, Ingush, Kayah Li and Nivkh. When a language has one or more
than one uvular rhotic – /ʀ/ or /ʁ/ –, and no phonemic coronal rhotic, this/these uvular/s has/
have been counted as (a) rhotic(s), except when there exists explicit and convincing evidence
in the phonology of the language that /ʀ/ or /ʁ/ do not behave as sonorants but rather pattern
with some other non-liquid segment. Following this criterium, the uvulars of French, German,
Greenlandic (West), Hebrew and Yup’ik (Central) have been counted as rhotics. Armenian, on
the other hand, is classified as having three liquid consonants, /l/, /r/ and /ɻ/, and two rhotics
rather than three or even four (thus excluding /ʁ/ and /χ/ from the list of rhotics). This contrasts
with French, which has a /ʁ/ and a /l/ but no phonemic coronal rhotic distinct from /ʁ/, so French
is counted has having two liquids among which one is a rhotic (modern French /ʁ/ also has
[r] as one of its allophones, and [r] is known to have been the original realization of what has
become /ʁ/ – [ʁ], [ʀ], [χ], [r] etc. – in contemporary French. A similar development has occurred in
German). Along the same reasoning, Lakhota is analysed as having only one liquid, /l/, because
its /ʁ/, /χ/ and /χ’/ are not considered sonorants by Lakhota specialists and they pattern with
the fricatives.1 Lakhota is thus considered as having only one liquid phoneme, /l/ and no rhotic.
It should be noted that ʁ and ʀ are relatively rare as phonemes in the languages of the sample,
be they considered as rhotics or not (12 languages2 have one of them or the two of them) so
a different choice would have had no major impact on the overall results of this study. The
exaggerated importance that ʀ and ʁ have been granted in the class of rhotics undoubtedly
comes from their salience in the dominant languages French and German, but from the point
of view of the present research, they appear as marginal elements.
1
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DOI: 10.5334/g jgl.922
I am grateful to an anonymous reviewer for providing detailed information and references concerning Lakhota.
These 12 languages are: Apibon, French, Georgian, German, Greenlandic, Hebrew (Modern), Ingush, Lakhota,
2
Lezgian, Nivkh, Yukaghir and Yup’ik (Central).
Table 1 Liquids (= l- and r-like
sounds).
3
Many languages have some sort of r and l sounds in free variation, or use the two articulations
as allophones of a single phoneme. A close examination of the phonological and phonetic
structure of the 200 languages under scrutiny has revealed that when a language has only one
phonemic liquid (conditional or unconditional) segment – and this is the second most common
pattern found in the sample (54 languages, see annex 1) – it sometimes happens that this
unique liquid is transcribed as a lateral (we will delve into the caveats of transcription below
in 3.3), even though it may have a genuinely rhotic allophone as in Korean, Luvale, Meithei,
Nahuatl, Sanuma, for instance. In such cases, this unique lateral liquid has been labeled as
rhotic. Similarly, a rhotic phoneme noted as /r/ for instance may frequently have a lateral
allophone, especially in systems which have only one alveolar liquid.
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A difficult case is when one or several lateral approximant symbols represent the only phonemic
liquids within their system and are not explicitly reported as contrasting with a prototypical
rhotic as defined above, nor as having a rhotic allophone.3 In such cases, the language has
been considered as lacking a rhotic phoneme, although the possibility that the lateral phoneme
also has an unreported rhotic allophone cannot be dismissed, especially in the case of underdescribed languages (which is what are almost all the languages which fall into this category).
15 languages in the sample correspond to this case: Araona, Dani (Lower Grand Valley), Imonda,
Kiowa, Kongo, Koromfe, Lakhota, Mandarin, Miwok, Ndyuka, Oneida, Passamaquoddy-Maliseet,
Pomo (Southeastern), Supyire, Vietnamese.
This being said, one should keep in mind that the most represented liquid system in the
languages in the sample (72 languages, 36%) is quite expectedly a system that combines a
coronal lateral /l/ and a coronal rhotic /r/, which is phonetically almost always a dental or an
alveolar tap or trill.
The set of segments which will be recognized as rhotics for the present study are given in
Table 2. Core, or unconditional rhotics, appear in bold.
CORE (UNCONDITIONAL) RHOTICS
SYSTEMIC (CONDITIONAL) RHOTICS
DENTAL
UVULAR
ALVEOLAR
Trills
r̪
r
Taps or flaps
ɾ̪
ɾ
RETROFLEX
ɽ
ʀ
ʁ
Approximants
ɹ
ɻ
Lateral flap
ɺ
ɺ̣
2.2 DEFINING THE TERM “WORD”
Another term which requires clarification is that of “word” as used for instance in the recurring
key expression of this paper “word-initial rhotic avoidance”. This term should be understood
in its broadest acceptance. “Word” denotes a morpho-lexical unit, whose nature and status is
obviously likely to vary across languages, and it is used in the context of the present study as a
cover term for lexeme, wordform, morph, stem, root or base, depending on the languages and
on the theoretical stands of the linguists who have provided the description and analyses on
which I have relied.
A not uncommon case in the database is when a language accepts affixes or clitics beginning
with a rhotic, but not full lexical words, as, for instance, Guarani (Dooley 2006), Japanese
(Labrune 2014) or Kayardild (Round 2009). In such cases, “word” will mean “full lexeme”. In
a language where no morphological unit, either autonomous or non-autonomous, accepts a
rhotic in the initial position, the term “word” will have a broader acceptance and will have to be
3
Here, the most common case is when a language possesses one liquid represented by the coronal lateral /l/
(18 languages). There are also 12 languages with two laterals and no genuine rhotic. These laterals are /ɬ/, /ʎ/ or
some other type of lateral phoneme in addition to a “plain” apical /l/. Languages with three laterals and no genuine
rhotics are rare (only four: Haida, Nez Perce, Squamish, Zulu), and languages with four or more laterals lacking a
rhotic phoneme do not occur in the sample.
Table 2 Rhotics.
4
understood as “morph” or sometimes “stem”. Here again, it is impossible to achieve a perfectly
satisfactory terminology, given the heterogeneity of the sources as well as specific properties
of the various languages.
2.3 DEFINING THE TERM “INITIAL”
A related issue to that of “word” is what is meant by “initial position”. I take the term “initial”
to mean the first phonological segment of a word, and the one which is most likely to be
denoted in the orthography of the language – when the script is phonographic – or in the
phonological transcriptions by linguists. But one should be cautious to note that this is not
necessarily the form under which words are uttered at the phonetic level, either because the
initial phonological rhotic may have a non-rhotic allophone word-initially, as in Awa Pit, for
instance, or because it is preceded by a prothetic segment which is not consistently denoted
in the orthography, as in Beja. This will lead us to distinguish two types of WIRA: phonological
WIRA and phonetic WIRA. This distinction will be defined in Section 4 below.
Unfortunately, precise descriptions of both the phonological and phonetic nature of initial
segments are not always available in the descriptions, especially in the case of under-described
languages.
2.4 WHAT DOES “AVOIDANCE” MEAN ?
In this paper, the terms “avoidance”, or “restriction”, will be used in preference to other possible
terms also found in the literature dealing with word-level phonotactics, such as “prohibition”
or “absence”. Thus we shall speak of “word-initial avoidance” rather than of “word-initial
prohibition” or “absence”. This is because, thorough progress into this research has revealed
that the possibility for a rhotic segment to occur in the word-initial position cannot be easily
reduced to a ‘yes’ or ‘no’ appreciation. In other words, we are dealing with a scalar phenomenon.
It is thus more appropriate to consider things in terms of avoidance or restriction, rather than
in categorical terms such as prohibition or absence. It is important to note that there are
actually very few languages with literally zero (0, i.e. not even 1) words beginning with a rhotic
in their entire lexicon, if periphery lexemes such as loanwords and onomatopoeic words are
included (on the issue of loanwords and onomatopoeia, see Section 3.2 below). Another issue
is that a given segment might be rare in the initial, but also in the non-initial (medial or final)
position. Thus, a low number of words beginning with a rhotic should not necessarily be taken
as revealing WIRA if the rhotic is also rare in other positions. An example can be found in Taba,
in which /r/ beginning words are rare, but this phoneme is said altogether to be “relatively
unfrequent” (Bowden 1997: 57). Because there does not seem to be any asymmetry in the
occurrence of /r/ within Taba words, the apparent rarity of this consonant word-initially cannot
be considered as revealing WIRA, and Taba has thus not been labelled as a language with rare
initial rhotics in the database. An extreme case is that of languages containing no phonemic
liquid at all (there are actually seven such languages in the database, 3.5%) and hence no
phonemic rhotic. For obvious reasons, these languages do not possess word-initial phonemic
rhotics (although they may, in theory, possess phonetic ones) but they are not considered to
be WIRA languages.
It appears that the best indicator of a possible word-level distributional restriction is the ratio
between the number of word-initial rhotics and that of non-initial rhotics, or between wordinitial rhotics and rhotics in all word positions (including the initial). For instance, in Maninka
(Rovenchak 2011), /r/ occurs 16 times in the initial position of words in a textual corpus of
28.338 tokens, but 1564 times in all positions (including the initial).4 So, even though a number
of 16 words beginning with /r/ cannot be considered especially low in the absolute, and that
Maninka cannot be considered as a language with no word-initial rhotics, one can nevertheless
assess that /r/ is rare word-initially in Maninka because of the positional asymmetry revealed by
the statistical data. So “avoidance” should not be understood as corresponding to an absolute
0 but to a remarkably and presumably significant low frequency. Unfortunately, frequency data
4
These figures can be compared which those for /b/, for instance. /b/ occurs 1823 times in initial position and
3077 times in all positions (including the initial) so that according to Rovenchak (2011), no significant positional
difference can be found for /b/ in Maninka, contrary to /r/.
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of this sort are extremely rare for under-described languages, but the Maninka case provides
a good illustration of how one can approach a better understanding and definition of what
“avoidance” and “rarity” mean, especially in a cross-linguistic approach.5
3 METHODOLOGICAL ISSUES
This section provides relevant information concerning the language sample used for this study
and the structure of the WIRA database (3.1), the status of special lexemes such as loanwords
or mimetic words within a language’s lexicon from the perspective of WIRA (3.2), as well as
the problems raised by descriptive and transcriptional heterogeneity across the sources (3.3).
3.1 THE LANGUAGE SAMPLE
The language sample used for this study is based on the set of 200 languages designed by
the World Atlas of Language structures (Dryer & Haspelmath 2013) in order to serve as a
representative sample of typological, genealogical and geographical diversity (see annex 2).
For the purpose of this research, this set of 200 languages has been organized into a database
using Excel. For each language, the following data have been collected: number of phonemic
liquids in the overall inventory, sub-inventory of the phonemic laterals and rhotics and their
phonetic realization, patterns of word-initial occurrence (i.e whether at least one of the liquids
undergoes word-initial avoidance and the pattern according to which it does, including the
allophonic processes), sources and references, and other relevant information when necessary.
This database has then been surveyed in order to reveal rhotic (and more generally liquid)
phonotactic patterns in relation to word-initial avoidance, the results of which are presented
in Section 4.
Relevant information concerning languages which are not included in the 200-language
sample has also been collected, but all the statistics and general observations are based on
the 200–language sample, except when otherwise specified.
3.2 CORE LEXICON VS. PERIPHERY LEXICON
The core lexicon of a language is made up of all its native words,6 excluding mimetic words
and proper names. Loanwords have not been taken into account in order to validate the
observation whether rhotics are allowed word-initially in case a language allows rhotics in the
initial position of loanwords but not of native words. However, loanwords generally prove to be
very useful data in order to observe the behavior of word-initial liquids in WIRA languages, since
loanwords reveal the strategies that WIRA languages develop when confronted with a wordinitial rhotic in the source language, an issue that will be examined in Section 5.
5
Ideally, it would be desirable to adopt explicit numerical criteria to determine whether a language is a WIRA
language or not. For instance, one could decide that a language which contains less than x% of its lexicon starting
with a rhotic will be categorized as a WIRA language (x being dependent on the total number of phonemes of
the language). Practically, however, this would be impossible to put into application because: i) we do not have
reliable lexicon lists (dictionaries) of many of the languages of the sample; ii) we do not have data concerning the
frequency of occurrence of phonemes within languages for most of the languages of the WALS set, and when we
do, it is generally the case that loans, mimetics etc. are included in the sample of words retained for the frequency
count; iii) when working with dictionaries, the problem is that orthography does not necessarily reflects phonology,
so x would be difficult to compute; iv) most importantly, as already discussed for the Maninka case, it is not the
absolute frequency in the initial which is relevant, but the ratio between initial frequency and non-initial one; v)
finally, other considerations than the rough number of entries in a dictionary have to be taken into account. For
instance, if a language has, say, 50 words starting with r, but that 46 of these entries contain the same prefix, then
we are left with 4 r-beginning words (or 5 if we include one of the entries containing the prefix). These issues lead
one to conclude that a “by hand”, case by case examination is the best – if not ideal – way to proceed, provided
that the criteria are identical and that the descriptor/analyst is the same person. This is also the reason why
intermediate labels such as “rare”, “rare?” and “present?” have been adopted in this study (see section 4.2). They
serve as buffer categories and they actually reflect the fact that WIRA should be regarded as a scalar phenomenon
rather than as a dichotomic one.
6
Or, more precisely, of all the words which are not obviously of foreign origin to the best of our knowledge.
This raises the issue of the nature of the opposition between diachrony and synchrony, and the status of fossilized
features or structures that may endure in a language. In many languages of the sample, rhotics seem to be
accepted word-initially, but only in words that turn out, upon closer examination, to be ancient loanwords.
However, native speakers are not necessarily aware of the foreign origin of these words. “Loanwordness” is actually
not a unitary quality. Some words are more loanword-like than others.
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Let us consider a few concrete examples. Following this criterium, Imonda, for instance, has
been considered as a one-liquid, rhotic-less language, because Imonda has two liquids, a /l/
and a /r/, but the /r/, an alveolar trill, occurs only in sound imitating words (Seiler 1985).
A more delicate case is that of Drehu, in which /r/ (/or /ʀ/) is said to occur in a few loans but also
in local personal names (Unë & Ujicas 1984). In the present study, Drehu has been considered
as containing no /r/, but as having two liquids phonemes which are /l/ and /l̥/.
The case of Japanese is interesting and deserves a detailed discussion because it is representative
of a number of other comparable cases in the database. A superficial examination of a
modern Japanese dictionary reveals that there exist thousands of /r/-beginning words in the
language. At first sight, Japanese would thus appear as a non-WIRA language. However, a
closer inspection shows that all these words fall into one of the following categories: loanword
(mainly of Chinese and European origin), non-autonomous morpheme (suffix), mimetic word,
word having undergone initial vowel deletion, or special slang word resulting from moraic
inversion. In other words, it appears that /r/-initial words in Japanese are all of secondary
development (Labrune 1993; 2014). In the end, only one Japanese noun which does not resort
to the aforementioned origins can be found, the word risu (‘squirrel’). Given what we know of
the language, we can suspect that this word is probably a borrowing from a dialect of Chinese
or from another indeterminate language. From a panchronic point of view, Japanese can thus
be labelled as a WIRA language. However, this analysis is possible only because Japanese is
one of the best studied languages of the world, with a long and well-documented history and
a rich philological tradition. If Japanese had been an under-studied and endangered language,
for which only one general grammatical description was the only available documentation,
no doubt that the secondary nature of most of its word-initial rhotics would have remained
ignored, and Japanese would have been excluded from the set of WIRA languages.
3.3 INVENTORIES AND TRANSCRIPTION
The main difficulty of this study lays in the lack of comparability of the sources, because the
level of phonetic detail provided by different descriptors varies considerably. Transcriptions
and inventories thus differ depending on authors, language varieties, the coverage of the
description (whether loanwords are included or not), the theoretical approach of the author,
and a number of other factors. There therefore exist true and serious transcription and
comparability problems among the data. Transcriptions, especially, are more or less precise.
Some sources stay at a very superficial phonemic level and do not provide all the information
needed for the present research concerning allophonic variation. Such heterogeneity in
the sources undoubtedly represents the main difficulty in doing research on phonological
typology.
The inventories of liquid consonants used in this study all come from direct primary sources.
In a second step, these primary data have also been checked in the Lapsyd database (Lyon
Albuquerque Phonological Systems Database, http://www.lapsyd.ddl.ish-lyon.cnrs.fr/lapsyd/,
referenced as Maddieson et al. 2014–2020). In a few cases, when the Lapsyd data were in
contradiction with some of the methodological choices explicitly made in the present paper
(for instance, if the Lapsyd recognizes as a phoneme a liquid segment which occurs only
in loanwords), the sources have been checked again in order to achieve a satisfying choice
meeting the criteria of the present study. A total of 30 languages of the WALS 200-language
set were not yet described in the Lapsyd database (as to September 2019).
The Lapsyd inventory data has been used to double check the phonemic inventories, because,
as explained on the homepage of the Lapsyd website, all the inventories provided by the
database have been checked and homogenized by one unique compiler, Ian Maddieson, in
an effort to provide a uniform style of analysis, particularly as it relates to the inventories of
consonants and vowels. Lapsyd “selects a preferred analysis for each language and attempts
to harmonize the descriptions and transcriptions across all the languages” (Maddieson et
al. 2014–2020). The same type of harmonizing approach as developed by Lapsyd has been
pursued for the WIRA database. To the extent that the data provided by different sources have
been “filtered” by a single phonologist – the author of this paper – it is hoped that a satisfying
degree of uniformity and homogeneity has been achieved.
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Dictionaries have also proven a very useful source of information a far as initial occurrence
is concerned, for obvious reasons. When investigating the beginning of words, it is rather
easy to check how many words begin with <r> or <l> (or whatever grapheme chosen to
represent rhotics) in monolingual or bilingual dictionaries which use a phonographic system of
transcription, even if one should be cautious about loans, the notion of word vs. root, the use of
possible prothetic sounds which are usually not transcribed in standard orthographies, and the
morphological structure of the language.
Finally, when available, I have more than often relied on statements such as the ones
exemplified in (1) above to decide whether a given language should be categorized as a WIRA
language or not.
Due to the high number of the languages under investigation, the heterogeneity of the sources,
the differences in transcription according to different authors and the lack of documentation
for a number of languages, the results of this study are inevitably incomplete – if not erroneous
– for a number of languages. It is certain that some occurrences of WIRA have been overlooked,
and that the WIRA figures are thus under-estimated. When only one short descriptive source,
and no dictionary, exists for a language, the uncertainty is especially high; one cannot be sure
that a possible WIRA has not been missed, or simply not mentioned, by the descriptor, because
many descriptions, especially short ones, do not provide information concerning phonotactic
patterns and restrictions. However, it is hoped that this first attempt to categorize and quantify
the patterns of WIRA will offer a reliable picture of a phenomenon which has been largely
ignored in phonological and typological research,7 and that it will help stimulate further
research. Any comment or complementary information on any of the languages of the sample
can be sent to the author.
4 THE TYPOLOGY OF WIRA: GENERAL TENDENCIES
Let us now consider in detail the typology of WIRA in the 200 languages of the sample.
WIRA is a protean and scalar phenomenon which occurs with different patterns across the
languages of the sample. These various patterns of WIRA will be presented and discussed
below, with examples taken from the 200-language sample. Numerical data will also be
provided.
4.1 TYPES OF WIRA AND THE LEVELS OF ANALYSIS: EMIC-WIRA VS ETIC-WIRA
The level of analysis with which this study is concerned is primarily phonological. The most
frequent and typical instance of WIRA in the database is phonemic in nature, and will be
henceforth labeled as emic-WIRA. Emic-WIRA is represented by languages which possess one
or several phonemic rhotics, yet at least one of them does not occur word-initially. In the most
typical case, it means that the language has no native words beginning with at least one of its
rhotic phonemes at the lexical level. This pattern is the most frequently recorded WIRA pattern
in the database. It includes languages such as Basque, Japanese, Ju|’hoan,8 Khoekhoe, Kunama,
Lak, Sango, Spanish, Turkish, Yukaghir, and many others. Note that among this category, some
languages may possess several rhotics, but only a subset of the rhotics may be avoided wordinitially, while others are licit, as for instance in Gooniyandi, Nunggubuya, Spanish, Trumai and
many Australian languages.9 Further research is needed to investigate whether there exists a
correlation between the number of rhotic phonemes of a given language and the manner in
which a WIRA pattern occurs in that language.
7
Works which explicitly mention the phenomenon from a cross-linguistic point of view are Labrune (1993;
2014) Walsh Dickey (1997), and Proctor (2009).
Ju|’hoan has an unusually large number of consonants but only one liquid. It is not clear whether this liquid
8
is phonemic or phonetic. If [r] is treated as a positional allophone of /d/ medially, Ju|’hoan should be regarded as
an etic-WIRA language. If [r] is analyzed as phonemic, it becomes an emic-WIRA language, because /r/ is never
found in the initial position (Snyman 1975). In the database compiled for the present study, the liquid of Ju|’hoan
is regarded as phonemic (following Snyman 1975) and Ju|’hoan is thus categorized as an emic-WIRA language.
There are 38 languages (see annex 1, Table 7) which contain more than one rhotic in the database. 14 of them
9
belong to the Australian family.
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8
There also exists another type of WIRA which can be labeled as phonetic, or etic-WIRA. This
latter type is less easily detectable and presumably less often reported in sources but it cannot
be ignored. Two different sub-types of etic-WIRA have been identified. In the first sub-type, a
given rhotic occurs word-initially at the phonological and lexical levels, but not at the phonetic
level, because in the initial position, it is either realized as a non-rhotic or it is preceded by
a prothetic vowel. For instance, in Warao, the rhotic is a flap intervocalically but always a
stop [d] in the initial (Romero-Figueroa 1997). So in Warao, there exist word-initial phonemic
rhotics, but no phonetic ones. Another example is Wichita: in Wichita, /ɾ/ is nasalized in the
initial position (Garvin 1950). An example of a language which adds a prothetic element to
a word-initial rhotic is Tiwi. In Tiwi, a language with two rhotic phonemes, /r/ does not occur
word-initially, while /ɹ/ is rare in that position. According to Osborne (1974), in the few words in
which /ɹ/ occurs initially, it is often preceded by a slight introductory glide. Tiwi thus appears as
a language which exhibits both emic- and etic-WIRA. In Armenian, too, a language with two
rhotics, a prothetic schwa is optionally inserted before the handful of /ɻ/ beginning words (Vaux
1998: 122).10
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The second sub-type of etic-WIRA pertains to languages which contain a rhotic segment which
stands as the non-initial allophone of some other, non-liquid phoneme, (mainly /d/ or /t/), not
as the allophone of a rhotic or of a lateral phoneme. For instance, in Koromfe, a language with
no phonemic rhotic, the alveolar flap [ɾ] is an allophone of /d/ in native words, and /d/ occurs
as [d] only word-initially and after a nasal stop consonant (Rennison 1997). Another example
is Dani (Lower Grand Valley), which has only one liquid phoneme, /l/, and no rhotic phoneme,
but a rhotic ([r]) occurs as an allophone of /t/ intervocalically (van der Stap 1966). American
English, which has one phonemic rhotic /ɹ/ which appears word-initially, is not an emic-WIRA
language, but it is an etic-WIRA language because an alveolar flap [ɾ] occurs as the intervocalic allophone of /t/ or /d/.
Deciding whether a language is an emic- or etic-language sometimes poses a methodological
problem because in a number of cases, for instance Dani or Koromfe, the language could
probably have been described as having a rhotic phoneme, say /r/, with a word-initial allophone
[d] or [t], depending on the analytical choices made by the descriptor. Yet it should be noted
that in languages such as Dani and Koromfe, even if the rhotic allophone had been granted
the status of representing the phoneme in preference to the non-rhotic allophone, or if the
language had been analyzed as containing two different phonemes standing in complementary
distribution, the language would still be classified as an etic-WIRA or emic-WIRA language
according to the approach11 followed in this study.
There are thus, strictly speaking, two types of WIRA that need to be distinguished: phonological,
or phonemic WIRA (= emic-WIRA) and phonetic WIRA (=etic-WIRA). These two major types are
synthesized in Table 3.
Emic-WIRA
(phonological)
a)
Etic-WIRA
(phonetic)
b) words of the native lexicon may begin with a phonological rhotic but this rhotic
undergoes mutation or prothesis at the surface level
c)
the language does possess at least one phonemic rhotic, and one of these at least
does not occur in the word-initial position of words of the native lexicon
no word of the native lexicon begins with a rhotic but a rhotic occurs as a positional
allophone of a non-rhotic phoneme in the non-initial position
10 Interestingly, cases of prothetic vowel insertions are often described as “optional” or “speaker dependent” in
the sources, whereas other types of etic-WIRA less often are.
11 Such complex cases are rare in the sample. The most delicate one is found in Khoekhoe, where a rhotic
deemed phonemic by Brugman (2009) stands in complementary distribution with a non-rhotic phoneme, /t/,
except at the beginning of a number of suffixes. In other analyses (Benveniste 1939; Greenberg 1966), the two
are regarded as allophones of a unique, non-rhotic phoneme, because (presumably) only the root inventory is
taken into account. Along Brugman’s approach, which has been adopted for this study, Khoekhoe is an emic-WIRA
language, along Greenberg’s and Benveniste’s, it would be an etic-WIRA language. A similar case occurs in Bribri,
which has been categorized as a one liquid/one rhotic language following Chevrier (2007), but other authors posit
up to three different liquids in Bribri. Bribri is both an emic- and etic-WIRA language. See also the comment on
Ju|’hoan in footnote 8.
Table 3 Types of WIRA
languages.
9
Recall that there are also non-WIRA languages, which are of two different types, too:
languages with one or several phonemic liquids which appear word-initially with no restriction,
and languages which lack both phonemic and phonetic rhotics. Among the latter type there
is a rather high proportion of languages for which we lack precise and detailed descriptions,
especially concerning the possibility of an etic-WIRA feature.12
4.2 EMIC-WIRA
After defining the various degrees of emic-WIRA, this section provides the general statistics for
this type of WIRA. Emic-WIRA has been categorized along a scale of six values which serve to
identify and label the different word-level distributional patterns displayed by rhotic phonemes,
as well as the level of information which could be gathered for each language. The status of
each of the 200 languages of the sample with regards to these labels can be found in annex 2.
The values are as follows:
–
ABSENT: there is at least one rhotic phoneme in the language which does not occur wordinitially in native words. Following the criteria adopted for this study (see Section 3), a
handful of exceptions (onomatopoeia, etc.) are tolerated.
Examples: Aymara, Basque, Burushaski, Japanese, Trumai, etc.
–
RARE: there exist word-initial rhotics in the native lexicon of the language, but they
represent a seemingly low proportion of the lexicon.
Examples: Daga, Kera, Maricopa, Selknam, Swahili, etc.
–
RARE?: there exists a number of word-initial phonemic rhotics, which seem to represent
a relatively low proportion of the lexicon, but the asymmetry cannot be fully ascertained.
Further research, or a better first-hand knowledge of the language could reveal that these
words are loans.
Examples: Arapesh, Chinantec (Lealao) (only two languages).
–
PRESENT?: word-initial phonemic rhotics seem common, but additional research should
be conducted because there exists a slight suspicion that these word-initial rhotics might
be limited to certain types of words (loans) or that they may be rather interpreted as
reflecting an etic-WIRA (prothetic vowel or word-initial allophony not transcribed in the
standard spelling).
Examples: Diola Fogny, Huitoto (Minica), Krongo, Lango, Ngiti, etc.
–
PRESENT: word-initial rhotics exist in the language with normal frequency.
Examples: Arabic, Cayuvava, English, Maori, Quechua (Imbabura), etc
–
IRRELEVANT: this label is used for languages which possess no phonemic rhotics in their
inventory.
Examples: Ekari, Ket, Supyire, Pirahã, Usan, etc.
Note that all the languages coming under one of the above labels may also exhibit etic-WIRA
in addition to emic-WIRA.
The detailed figures of emic-WIRA in the 200-language sample appear in Table 4. The five first
categories exclusively concern phonemic rhotics, thus providing data for emic-WIRA. See also
annex 2 for the complete list of languages and their WIRA status.
12 Following a comment by an anonymous reviewer, one could ask whether one is really dealing with “avoidance”
in all the subtypes of WIRA described in Table 3. This is because while vowel prothesis or initial mutation of a
word-initial phonemic rhotic can be rather straightforwardly interpreted as avoidance of a given phonotactic
pattern through the use of specific repair strategies, the mere absence of any words beginning with a phonemic or
phonetic rhotic as well as the asymmetrical distribution of rhotic phones that occur in subtypes a) and c), could just
constitute a static, non-dynamic pattern, or even simply an accidental gap rather than a strict case of avoidance
if the term avoidance is understood as implying some sort of teleonomic dimension. The examination of loanword
adaptation by WIRA languages, which will be undertaken in Section 6, will bring insights to this issue, which
nevertheless requires further investigation, and should be, in all events, apprehended from a broader phonological
perspective, detached from the mere issue of rhotics.
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LABEL
Nº OF LANGUAGES
%
“absent”
61
30.5%
“rare”
15
7.5%
“rare?”
2
1%
“present?”
14
7%
“present”
67
33.5%
“irrelevant”
41
200
TOTAL
Nº OF LANGUAGES
%
78
39%
81
40.5%
20.5%
41
20.5%
100%
200
100%
The number of languages which exhibit some degree of emic-WIRA in the language sample
amounts to 78 out of 200 (39%), vs. 81 (40.5%) which do not.
Furthermore, it should be noted that the remaining 81 languages are not all necessarily
languages which can be considered as accepting rhotics word-initially. They also include
languages about which no sufficient information on the status of rhotics word-initially was
available (such languages are likely to be found in the “present?” category.). This is because,
when no specific information about WIRA was found for a language, this language has been
classified, by default, as a word-initial rhotic accepting language. So the number of word-initial
rhotic avoiding languages might be higher than indicated.
Languages pertaining to the last category (“irrelevant”) contain no phonemic rhotic, but while
they do not represent cases of emic-WIRA, they may qualify for etic-WIRA (just as emic-WIRA
languages may, too). For this reason, Table 4 does not tell us the whole story about WIRA. We
also have to survey the language sample for specific cases of etic-WIRA, because etic-WIRA
languages may or may not have phonemic rhotics. This will be done in the next section.
Clearly, the number of languages which avoid rhotics word-initially at the phonemic level is
strikingly much higher than expected on a purely random basis, a feature which has been
overlooked, probably owing to the fact that the most studied Indo-European languages like
English, French, German or Russian do allow rhotics at the beginning of words, while in Spanish,
another dominant Indo-European language, WIRA is obscured by the orthography. The first
finding of this study is thus that rhotic avoidance in the initial position of words constitutes a
recurring structural property in the world’s languages.
4.3. ETIC-WIRA
Let us now examine etic-WIRA. As already mentioned, etic-WIRA occurs under two
different sub-types: in the first sub-type (b. in Table 3), a phonemic initial rhotic undergoes
mutation and is phonetically realized as a non-rhotic segment, generally a coronal stop, or is
preceded by a prothetic element, always a vowel, generally a schwa. In the second sub-type
(c. in Table 3), a phonetic rhotic stands as a positional allophone of a non-rhotic phoneme
in the non-initial position. In both types, and putting apart the prothetic vowel cases, one
observes a complementary distribution between a non-rhotic and a rhotic in, respectively,
the word-initial and the non-initial position. The languages which exhibit etic-WIRA in the
sample are presented in Table 5, with the phonetic details of the alternation involving the
rhotic segment. Note also that etic-WIRA sometimes implies neutralization, whereby the
rhotic is distinctive in medial position but neutralized with some other phoneme in word-initial
position.
There are 30 languages which have been identified as etic-WIRA languages, representing 15%
of the sample. Note that nine of them were also in the category of emic-WIRA. It is highly
probable that there exist many other cases of etic-WIRA in the sample. This type of WIRA is
probably under-estimated because the level of phonetic detail which allows its identification
is not always achieved in descriptions. Moreover, dictionaries may not record the presence of a
prothetic vowel in r-initial words. Or, on the contrary, the prothetic vowel has become fossilized
and lexicalized, and it is now denoted in the orthography, which makes the language look like
an emic-WIRA language, as in Yup’ik (Central).
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Table 4 Emic-WIRA statistics
in the 200-language sample.
WORD-INITIAL ALLOPHONE
WORD-INTERNAL
ALLOPHONE
PHONEME
LANGUAGE
COMMENTS
[t]
[r]
/t/
Awa Pit
[t]
[ɾ]
/t/
Comanche
[t]
[ɾ]
/t/
Dani
(Lower Grand Valley)
[t]
[ɾ]
/t/
(American) English
[t]
[ɾ]
/t/
Miwok
(Southern Sierra)
[t]
[ɾ]
/t/
Sanuma
[t]
[r]
/r/
(Southern) Paamese
[d]
[ɽ] (retroflex tap)
/d/
Bribri
[d]
[r] or [ɾ]
/d/
Diola Fogny
[d]
[ɾ], [l] or [n]
/d/
Grebo
[d]
[ɾ]
/d/
Koromfe
[d]
[r], [ɾ] or [ɹ] (free
variants)
/r/
Lavukaleve
also emic-WIRA
[d]
[ɾ]
/ɾ/
Otomi
also emic-WIRA
[d]
[r] or [l]
/l/
Sentani
also emic-WIRA
[d]
[ɾ]
/d/
Supyire
the rhotic allophone is used in a non-accented
syllable non-initially (Carlson 1994).
[d]
[ɾ]
/d/
Tagalog
[d]
[r]
/d/
Una
[d]
[ɾ]
/d/
Usan
[d]
[ɾ] or [ɺ]
/ɺ/
Warao
[gr] (rare), [d̥] or [l]
[ɾ]
/ɾ/
Cayuvava
[l] or [ˁ]
[r]
/r/
Khmer
[l]
[r]
/l/
Koasati
[l]
[ɾ]
/l/
Meithei
also emic-WIRA
[l]
[r] or [ɾ]
/r/
Thai
certain speakers
[n]
[ɾ]
/ɾ/
Wichita
Prothetic vowel [ə] (optional)
[ɻ]
/ɻ/
Armenian
Prothetic vowel [i] or [ə] (most
speakers)
[r]
/r/
Beja
Prothetic vowel
[ɾ]
/r/
Ingush
Prothetic vowel (“schwa onset”)
[ɾ]
/ɾ/
Yaqui
Prothetic vowel (= slight
introductory glide transcribed as [ə])
[ɻ]
/d/
Tiwi
“after non-front vowels, in “laxing environments”
(Wistrand-Robinson & Armagost 2012)
also emic-WIRA
in fast speech
also emic-WIRA: Bribri has a phonemic /r/ which
does not occur word-initially (emic-WIRA) but it also
has a [ɽ] which is an allophone of /d/ word-medially
and word-finally (etic-WIRA; Chevrier 2017)
also emic-WIRA
a prothetic vowel is added in front of initial ProtoNakh *r in Ingush (Nikolayev & Starostin 1994: 93)
also emic-WIRA
also emic-WIRA
5 WIRA IN LOANWORD ADAPTATION
In many languages, even though native words lack initial rhotics, the treatment of peripheral
lexemes beginning with a rhotic, especially loanwords, deserves special attention because it
allows us to observe directly how a WIRA language behaves when confronted to a word-initial
rhotic. Unfortunately, very few descriptive works provide any information regarding the issue of
Table 5 Etic-WIRA patterns in
the 200-language sample.
loanword adaptation, and when they do, they often remain vague or laconic. This is definitively
an issue for which more systematic description is needed.13
From the partial documentation that I was able to gather about around 30 languages of the
sample concerning loanword adaptation, it appears that two broad adaptation strategies of
loanword initial rhotics occur in WIRA languages:
–
WIRA is no longer enforced in loans. Rhotic initial loans are adapted with an initial rhotic in the
target language, so one can talk of faithful adaptation (i.e adaptation of a rhotic as a rhotic).
Two main sub-cases occur: i) the borrowing language did possess one or several phonemic
rhotics, like Acoma, Armenian, Japanese, Kannada, Korean, Mangarayi,14 Nubian (Dongolese),
Rama, Turkish, etc. and now allows it or them to occur word-initially in loanwords, so the
adaptation process consists merely in an extension of the phonotactic possibilities of the
rhotic(s); or, ii) the borrowing language did not possess any rhotic phoneme and comes to
acquire one15 in loans, in various word positions including the initial, thus expanding the
number of its distinctive segments, as did for example Drehu, Koromfe, Meithei, Tagalog or
Zulu, etc. The new rhotic phoneme is generally a coronal tap or trill, but not exclusively and
its phonetic nature seems to depend on the language from which the loans are made (for
instance, Drehu seems to have acquired a /ʀ/ in loans from French). It is not clear whether
languages may develop two or more rhotic phonemes at once (see footnote 15).
–
WIRA is enforced in loans. A repair strategy of the same nature as the ones illustrated
in Table 5 above is applied in order to make the loan conform to the phonology of the
borrowing language. Although three types of repair strategies can be expected to occur,
i.e. prothesis, mutation and deletion, prothesis seems to be the most frequently observed
process of initial rhotic adaptation in loans, followed by mutation. Instances of deletion
have not been observed in the sample, except a restricted instance of it in Korean (see
below). The prothetic segment is generally a vowel, as in Basque or Koyraboro Senni,
but it can also rarely be a consonant, as in Otomi, which is said to occasionally insert
a (= prothetic N before) r-initial words borrowed from Spanish, for instance remedio –>
Nrremedio (orthographic forms, Hernández-Cruz et al. 2010). When mutation occurs, the
rhotic seems to be most often realized as a coronal lateral ([l]) as in Siberian Nenets16 or
in former loans from Quechua into Mulayq’ Aymara,17 or as a voiced stop [d]), but there
are very few certain examples of this latter kind in the sample.
It is important to note that these patterns are not mutually exclusive: they can co-occur
within the same language, the second strategy being adopted before the first one becomes
generalized. They generally reveal different temporal strata of language contact and borrowing.
This is exemplified by Basque and Korean.
13 One can suppose that most descriptors do not find it necessary to explicitly mention the case of loans when
loans just follow the rules of the native lexemes. For instance, in an etic-WIRA language such as the ones described
in Section 4.3, if loans beginning with a rhotic undergo exactly the same process as native words beginning with
a rhotic, no mention will be made of the phenomenon – seen as a non-phenomenon. But no mention could also
mean that the language has not borrowed many words from other languages, or that the surrounding languages
are also WIRA language (a situation which would hold for Australia, where WIRA is a widely spread areal feature),
or that the descriptor was not interested in loanword phonology, which seems to be a common situation when
describing poorly endowed languages.
14 Mangarayi has two rhotics, /ɾ/ and /ɻ/ (a retroflexed glide). Neither occurs initially in native words but /ɻ/
occurs word-initially in a few loanwords and personal names adapted from other areas (Merlan 1982: 186).
15 The case of a language acquiring an opposition between several rhotics in the word-initial position of loans is
not documented in the database. However, this could just be a consequence of the fact that languages with two
rhotics are not very common (36 languages), and, among them, languages which would be a possible source for
loans and in which two distinct phonological rhotics distinctively occur in the word-initial are even less common
(only 9 languages). For instance, Spanish and Gascon are two major source languages for loans into Basque, and
they both have two phonemic rhotics, but one of them, the tap, does not occur word-initially, so the conditions
for Basque acquiring an opposition between two rhotics word-initially in loanwords are not met. The other major
contact language from which Basque is borrowing loans is French, but French has only one phonemic rhotic.
16 In Nenets, an emic-WIRA language with four liquids phonemes, a lateral /l/, a palatalized /l j/, an alveolar
or dental trill /r/ and a palatalized trill /rj/, the two rhotics do not occur word-initially in native words. In loans,
according to Salminen (1998), #r_ is adapted as #l_ in the Siberian dialects, and as #r_ in the European ones.
17 In Mulayq’ Aymara, an emic-WIRA language with one rhotic /ɾ/, Quechua words beginning with an /r/ used
to be adapted with an /l/, but this is no longer the case and the Quechua initial rhotic is now adapted as a rhotic.
Spanish initial rhotics are adapted as /ɾ/. Initial /ɾ/ in loans receives a sibilant realization according to Hardman
(2001: 35). Interestingly, Spanish initial /d/ is also adapted as /ɾ/.
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Basque has three contrastive liquids: /l/ /ɾ/ and /r/. Neither /ɾ/ nor /r/ occur word-initially in native
lexemes, so Basque is a WIRA language. In the course of history and of language contact,
loans from surrounding languages which accept rhotics word-initially have been adapted into
Basque with a prothetic vowel. For instance, Erroma ‘Rome’, arrazoi ‘reason’, arrazista ‘racist’,
errepublika ‘republic’, erlijio18 ‘religion’ (orthographic forms) etc. Note that the prothetic vowel
is not always identical. However, in very recent loans, /r/ is accepted word-initially, and modern
Basque now has words such as Ruanda, rap, ravioli, etc. with no prothetic vowel. In such cases,
the rhotic is always the trilled /r/, never the flap.
Another interesting case is Korean. Modern Native Korean, an emic-WIRA language, has one
liquid (rhotic) phoneme with two main positional allophones [l] and [r]~[ɾ]. [l] appears wordfinally or before or after consonants (including itself), while [r]~[ɾ] occurs between two vowels.
No native autonomous lexeme begins with the liquid phoneme.19 However, in the course of
its history, Korean has borrowed many words from non-WIRA languages, first from Chinese
and more recently from other languages, mainly European. In contemporary South Korean,
Sino-Korean morphemes undergo a /r/ → [n] / # _ process, except before /i/ and /j/ (see below),
while in the contemporary North Korean variety, a spelling reform has enforced the writing
of the initial liquid in Sino-Korean words, and due to a process of hypercorrection, it is now
phonetically realized in this position by younger speakers, but this can be seen as the result of
a relatively recent and artificial development.
So, for instance, in the southern variety of the language, the Sino-Korean morpheme /rak/ (樂)
‘pleasure’ occurs as [rak] word internally in [orak] 娯樂 ‘amusement’ and as [nak] word-initially
in [naɡwɔn] 樂園 ‘paradise’ (the /k/ undergoes voicing in this environment). Before /i/ and /j/ (the
palatal glide), the original liquid at the beginning of Old Chinese loans has been deleted, as in the
Sino-Korean morpheme /ri/ 理, ‘principle’, which is realized as [ri] in [kjori] 教理 ‘doctrine’ but as [i]
in [iju] 理由 ‘cause’. However, this process of initial /n/ deletion before /i/ and /j/ is of a secondary
nature, and came into effect after the 15th century. It also affected word initial /n/ before /i/ and
/j/ in native Korean words (for instance, /niph/ → /iph/ ‘leaf’). Even the first loans from European
languages used to follow these adaptation patterns (Song Nak-su 1987): for instance [namani]
‘Romania’ or [nasaro] ‘Lazarus’. However, the liquid is now accepted word-initially in recent
loanwords, for instance [ɾɛmphɨ] ‘lamp’, [ɾadio] ‘radio’ or [ɾitʃ͡ hin] ‘ricin’. It is realized as [r], [ɾ] or [l]
depending on the speakers or on other factors. But quite interestingly, the /r/ → [n] mutation seems
still persistent in young children’s speech: the first name of the author of this paper, Laurence, was
consistently uttered as [noɾansɨ] at the turn of this century by a young child born in 1994 in Seoul.20
An interesting result that emerges from the consideration of loanword adaptation and hence,
from a more diachronically oriented examination of the question of WIRA, is that many
languages have evolved from a WIRA language stage to a non-WIRA stage, that is, they have
come, with the course of time and under the influence of language contact, to accept wordinitial rhotics. The opposite case, i.e a language which was accepting rhotics word-initially but
has come to avoid them, does not occur at all in the sample, a compelling fact in itself which can
be assumed to reveal a general, quasi-universal trend of WIRA as a recessive feature. However,
it is necessary to mention here Gascon (Romance), which does not belong to the 200-language
sample, but stands out as a unique case. Gascon is the only language which has been identified
so far as having acquired WIRA by language contact (with Basque) or by substratum effect
(from the Aquitanian language, from which Basque is probably a descendant) – depending on
18 The adaptation of Latin religio as erlijio may also be interpreted as metathesis. The same adaptation process
occurs in other #rel- beginning words adapted into Basque, for instance erlazio ‘relation’, erlatibo ‘relative’, erloju
‘clock’, etc. However, it should be noted that metathesis as an adaptation strategy to enforce WIRA in loans has not
been found in the sample outside of these Basque examples, which could suggest that it is not metathesis which is
at work here, but some other phenomena, as assumed by Egurtzegi (2011) who posits a two-step evolution process:
/re-/ > /erre-/ > /er-/. I am grateful to an anonymous reviewer for providing me the Egurtzegi reference.
19 There is actually one exception: it is a metalinguistic term, the name of the <r> letter in the Hangul alphabet,
riɨl which was coined after the 15 th century.
20 As pointed out by a reviewer, the relationship between the two allophones of the Korean liquid could also
be a matter of syllabic constituency, because the asymmetry between [r] and [l] could be reduced to an onset/
coda asymmetry in most cases. More research is needed on this issue, but it is worth noting that even seen from
the point of view of syllabic licensing, Korean still appears as atypical because very few cases of distributional
allophony between a lateral and a rhotic governed by sub-syllabic licensing (onset vs. coda) have been found in
the language sample (Garo and Warao are the only other examples I am aware of).
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the theory of the origins of Basque one adopts. Although a Romance language descending from
Latin,21 a non-WIRA language, Gascon has developed a prothetic vowel [a] in words beginning
with /r/, as in arriu ‘river’, arròda ‘wheel’, arrastèth ‘rake’ (orthographic forms), respectively riu,
ròda, rastèl in Occitan, from Latin rivus, rota, rastellus.
Putting apart Gascon, there thus exists a clear directionality with respect to WIRA: a language
easily evolves from being a WIRA language to a non WIRA-language, but the opposite is
extremely rare. Gascon appears to be the sole example that I could find to this date.
6 TWO UNIVERSALS
The investigation conducted over the 200 languages of the sample, as well as additional
documentation over several dozen additional languages have led to the identification of the
following two universals:
Universal nº1 (implicational): if a language forbids /l/ word-initially, it also forbids /r/
in the same position. The reverse is not true, i.e. no language was found in which the
rhotic phoneme would be allowed word-initially but not the lateral.
Universal nº2: a rhotic never occurs as the positional allophone of a non-liquid
segment word-initially, whereas a rhotic segment may occur as the positional
allophone of a non-liquid segment word-medially.
No exception to these two universals have been found in the 200-language sample, nor in any
of the many other languages that I have investigated.
Korean, which could prima facie be regarded as an apparent counter example to Universal nº 1,
deserves special comments. Modern Korean, as previously mentioned, has one liquid phoneme
in its inventory, with two main positional allophones: the rhotic [r] ~ [ɾ] occurs word-initially
(in loans) and inter-vocalically (in loans and in native words), while the lateral [l] occurs wordfinally and before or after another consonant (including itself). However, the Korean case is not
a counter-example to Universal nº1 because the distributional constraint bearing on liquids in
Korean concerns two allophones of a single phoneme, not two distinct phonemes. Universal
nº1 holds for languages which possess two distinct liquid phonemes, for example, in the most
common case, a lateral and a rhotic.
This being said, it is worth noting that considered in the light of the results obtained by the
present study, Korean appears as a rather atypical language from the point of view of the
phonology of its liquid. From the general picture that has been gained on allophonic patterns
and liquids distributional properties in the previous pages, one would rather expect the
Korean liquid phoneme to use its lateral allophone word-initially rather than its rhotic one
in loanwords. This is obviously not what Modern Korean does, and an internal explanation
for this unexpected allophonic distribution should be sought, presumably in the history of
the language. It could be that, seen in the long diachronic range, Korean is presently going
through an intermediate state from a two liquids phoneme system towards a unique liquid
phoneme system. Actually, a number of linguists and philologists of Korean (Lee Sung-Nyong
1955, Cho Seung-Bog 1967:203, Lee Ki-Mun 1972:70, Vovin 2020) assume that Old and, for
some of them, also Middle Korean had two distinct liquid phonemes. Kim Yɔŋ-Čiŋ (1987) even
posits three different liquid phonemes for pre-Modern Korean. The typological evidence can
thus bring additional arguments to the “several liquids” hypothesis of Korean, which can in
turn account for the unusual phonological behavior of the liquid segments found in Modern
Korean loanwords.22
Another possible atypical case, partly resembling Korean, is Canela-Krahô. According to Popjes
& Popjes (1986), Canela-Krahô has one liquid phoneme, /l/ (a voiced alveolar lateral), with a flap
allophone occurring intervocalically, utterance-initially and following consonants. The source
21 Indo-european, the ancestor of Latin, was also a WIRA language, but it seems very unlikely that Gascon
would have inherited the WIRA feature from Indo-European. The secondary development resulting from language
contact or substratum effect is a more likely hypothesis.
22 The phonology of the Korean liquid displays many other peculiar aspects. As Kim-Renaud (1975: 66) says, “the
behavior of the liquid is one of the most complicated aspects of Korean phonology”.
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does not mention explicitly what the realization is word-initially when the word is not utterance
initial, and whether the ‘following consonant’ context is tauto-syllabic or hetero-syllabic, so
Canela-Krahô requires further study, but the fact that the rhotic allophone is preferred utterance
initially appears as rather uncommon from a cross-linguistic point of view. However, just like
Korean, Canela-Krahô is no exception to Universal nº1, because one single liquid phoneme is
involved in the distribution process, not two.
7 CONCLUSION AND FURTHER ISSUES
This paper has provided a sample based, quantitative description of WIRA in the languages
of the world, based on a large scale survey of 200 languages chosen for their genetic,
geographical and typological representativeness (WALS, Dryer & Haspelmath 2013). The results
are compelling: it has been found that 39% of the languages of the sample exhibit some degree
of emic-WIRA avoidance. If the languages which lack a rhotic in their phonological system
are excised from the sample, emic-WIRA languages make up 49.5% of the total. Assuming
that the WALS 200-language sample reflects the diversity of the languages of the world in
a balanced manner, WIRA can thus be considered as a recurrent structural property of the
world’s languages. At a more general level, this also means that the lower ability of rhotics to
stand as phonemic or phonetic word-initials should also be definitely recognized as one of the
properties that constitutes the essence of rhotics as a phonological class.
This study has also offered a methodological framework for the investigation of rhotics
phonotactic characteristics, showing that WIRA comes under different sub-patterns, which
need to be distinguished. Two main types occur: emic-WIRA, where a language has at least one
phonemic rhotic but no word which phonologically begins with at least one of the rhotics, and
etic-WIRA which comes under two forms: either the language possesses at least one phonemic
rhotic which occurs word-initially at the phonological and lexical levels but undergoes mutation
or prothesis, or the language has a phonetic rhotic which occurs as the allophonic realization of
a non-rhotic phoneme in the non-initial position.
The examination of how initial rhotics are adapted in loanwords from a non-WIRA language
into a WIRA language has also brought interesting insights, which lead to posit that WIRA is
a recessive feature. This is because WIRA appears to be easily lost through language contact.
There is a quasi-universal tendency for WIRA languages coming into contact with non-WIRA
languages to become, in turn, non-WIRA languages in loanword adaptations; only one
exception, Gascon, has been found outside of the 200-language sample.
Finally, on the basis of the results obtained through the investigation of the 200-language
database, two novel universals have been proposed: 1) if a language forbids /l/ word-initially,
it also forbids /r/ in the same position; 2) a rhotic never occurs as the positional allophone of a
non-liquid segment word-initially.
In addition to documenting and uncovering statistical patterns of WIRA, one of the goals of the
present research is also to provide an analytical grid for WIRA identification and classification,
in order to facilitate cross-linguistic comparisons in forthcoming studies and also to assess the
particular position of any language with respect to WIRA. More precisely, we saw that WIRA
can occur under different patterns, which need to be distinguished in order to allow for a more
thorough classification of the phonological and phonetic phonotactic patterns of rhotics. A lot
remains to be done, obviously, but in the light of the present research, we can observe with
a high degree of confidence that Korean, for instance, stands out as a typologically peculiar
language as far as WIRA is concerned. The phonology of its liquid(s) could thus be now reevaluated from the point of view of its compliance with WIRA typology. Another side-result
is that WIRA cannot be taken as evidence for genetic relationship, as it has sometimes been,
in order to justify the inclusion of a language in a given linguistic family. For instance, the lack
of roots beginning with a liquid consonant has been repeatedly interpreted as demonstrating
a supposed common origin of Korean and Japanese with Turkish, Mongolian or a number of
other languages. But we now know that there is just around one chance out of two that two
given languages may resemble each other with respect to word-initial rhotic occurrence, so
this criterium can definitely not be used to support genetic claims, and it should be just ignored
when comparing two languages.
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The next main issue on the research agenda on the distributional characteristics of rhotics is
that of why rhotics (or liquids) occur less frequently at the beginning of words than in other
positions in so many languages. The answer to this question should be sought in a number
of domains: articulatory phonetics, perceptual phonetics, functional phonology, history,
evolutionary linguistics, language contact, etc. Might rhotics be difficult to produce and/or to
perceive and recognize in that position? Might rhotics be phonologically “weak” segments, not
suited to the initial position of words where “strong” segments are preferred? But then, should
not a number of other segments such as semi-vowels be also avoided in the same context? The
issue of history and of evolutionary phonology is also susceptible to bring new insights to this
question, which definitely requires future research.
The results unearthed by this study also raise some new research issues that deserve further
investigation. First, it would be interesting to compare, from a general cross-linguistic point
of view, the behavior of rhotics with that of other segments known to undergo word-level
phonotactic restrictions such as /ŋ/, /h/, /ʔ/ or retroflex consonants, but also to compare, within
individual languages, the phonotactic restrictions bearing on rhotic(s) and those bearing on
non-rhotic segments. A similar investigation should be conducted on laterals, which are also
avoided word-initially in a number of languages, albeit to a lesser extent than rhotics. The
issue of the existence of a possible hierarchy among rhotics, and more generally liquids, with
respect to WIRA, is also worth of interest. Furthermore, in some languages which contain more
than one rhotic, only one of these rhotics may be sensitive to WIRA constraints. Do crosslinguistic generalizations emerge? What does this tell us about the nature of rhotic consonants
and about a possible hierarchy among them? Another question pertains to the precise role
of language contact in the inhibition of WIRA, and what it can reveal about the phonological
nature of rhotics in general. Finally, it would be necessary to conduct an investigation of the
geographical distribution of WIRA. This is only a short list of the very many topics of interest
concerning the phonology of WIRA in the languages of the world.
ADDITIONAL FILES
The additional files for this article can be found as follows:
•
ANNEX 1. Statistical data concerning the structure of liquid systems in the 200-language
sample. DOI: https://doi.org/10.5334/gjgl.922.s1
•
ANNEX 2. The 200-language sample (extracted from Dryer & Haspelmath, 2013). By
language alphabetical order, with emic and etic-WIRA status. DOI: https://doi.org/10.5334/
gjgl.922.s2
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Many people have helped me in a multitude of ways in order to develop the ideas exposed in
this paper, through reading and commenting earlier drafts or oral presentations of parts of this
work, and overall, by sending me useful information on one or several of the 200 languages
on which this research is based. First of all, I want to thank Jean-Pierre Minaudier for pointing
out to me dozens of WIRA languages, and sending me the relevant references. I also want
to acknowledge the help of the many linguists who have kindly and generously shared with
me their first-hand knowledge of some of the languages: Marie-Hélène Avril for Arabic
and Beja, Anaid Donabedian for Armenian, Vincent Collette for Cree, Françoise Guérin for
Ingush and Tchechen, Mary Pearce for Kera, Edward Vajda for Ket, Joël Miro for Gascon,
Francesca Merlan for Mangarayi, Aurore Monod for Trumai, and Jean-Pierre Minaudier,
again, for Fennic languages. I am also grateful to Baptiste Puyo and Georg Kaiser for
facilitating my access to some of the sources, and Leah Vandeveer for reading two
preliminary versions of this paper. I also thank the editors of this Glossa Issue, Adèle Jatteau
and Joaquim Brandao de Carvalho for inviting me to contribute a paper on the topic of
rhotics, and three anonymous reviewers who provided insightful comments. I am
particularly indebted to one of them for many useful remarks which greatly helped improve
the contents and the methodology of this research. All remaining errors are mine.
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COMPETING INTERESTS
The author has no competing interests to declare.
AUTHOR AFFILIATION
Laurence Labrune
Dept of Language Sciences, Bordeaux Montaigne University, 33600 Pessac Cedex FR & CNRS CLLE UMR
5263, FR
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TO CITE THIS ARTICLE:
Labrune, Laurence. 2021.
Word-initial rhotic avoidance:
a typological survey. Glossa:
a journal of general linguistics
6(1): 9. 1–19. DOI: https://doi.
org/10.5334/gjgl.922
Submitted: 18 February 2019
Accepted: 13 October 2020
Published: 27 January 2021
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