1092: Trilling: ɾ (pot of tea and para ti) Dec 5, 2017

Standard American English has the sound [ɾ], called a tap or a flap, in words like 'city' [sɪɾi] which in Received Pronunciation would be with a [t] ([sɪti]) or would be a glottal stop in some other dialects in Britain [sɪʔi]. This [ɾ] sound is produced by placing one's tongue on the roof of the mouth (specifically the alveolar ridge) for less time than one would to pronounce [t] as in 'tango'. This process is also sometimes called trilling. Trilling does not exist just as an allophone of [t], but also is an allophone for [r] or [ɹ], or a whole bunch of other sounds, theoretically. Indeed, in Spanish, the 'rolled R' or 'trilled R' written orthographically with a double-R in the middle of words is the same phoneme as this. In fact, the phrase "pot of tea" in Standard American English is more or less phonetically identical to the Spanish "para ti", which would be transcribed [paɾati]. The reason that IPA [ɾ] looks more like a lower-case R and less like a T is because of this in Spanish.