Voiced dental and alveolar taps and flaps

A voiced alveolar tap or flap is a type of consonantal sound, used in some spoken languages. The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents a dental, alveolar, or postalveolar tap or flap is ⟨ɾ⟩.

The terms tap and flap are often used interchangeably. Peter Ladefoged proposed the distinction that a tap strikes its point of contact directly, as a very brief stop, and a flap strikes the point of contact tangentially: "Flaps are most typically made by retracting the tongue tip behind the alveolar ridge and moving it forward so that it strikes the ridge in passing." That distinction between the alveolar tap and flap could be written in non-standard IPA with the tap as ⟨ɾ⟩ and the flap as ⟨ɽ⟩, the retroflex letter being used for the one that starts with the tongue tip curled back behind the alveolar ridge, though it could be written less ambiguously with the Americanist letter ⟨ᴅ⟩ (or IPA ⟨d̮⟩) for the tap and standard IPA ⟨ɾ⟩ for the flap. The distinction is noticeable in the speech of some American English speakers in distinguishing the words "potty" (tap) and "party" (flap).

For linguists who do not make the distinction, alveolars and dentals are typically called taps and other articulations flaps. No language contrasts a tap and a flap at the same place of articulation.

As a phoneme, the sound is analyzed as a rhotic consonant. In languages for which the segment is present but not phonemic, it is often an allophone of either an alveolar stop ([t], [d], or both) or a rhotic consonant.

If an alveolar flap is the only rhotic consonant in the language, it may be transcribed with ⟨r⟩ in broad transcription, despite that symbol technically representing a trill.

A voiced alveolar tapped fricative is reported from some languages, which is a very brief voiced alveolar non-sibilant fricative.