# Alveolar Trill

**URL:** <https://boards.straightdope.com/t/alveolar-trill/609290>\
**Category:** Factual Questions\
**Created:** [January 12, 2012, 3:40pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/alveolar-trill/609290 "2012-01-12T15:40:18Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 1\
**Page:** 1

<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![Johnny\_Angel](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/j/d26b3c/32.png) [@Johnny\_Angel](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Johnny_Angel)\
**Post date:** [January 12, 2012, 3:40pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/alveolar-trill/609290/1 "2012-01-12T15:40:18Z")

</div>

So, I’m finally getting around to trying to learn a proper alveolar trill. Even having worked out, crudely, how to make the tip of my tongue vibrate with minimal vibration in the velar, I find that once you add in co-articulation the task seems impossible. Before struggling on, I thought I’d see if someone here knows what’s supposed to be happening here.

First of all, the maneuver seems to require a great deal of time and energy. It seems to be okay coming off of a consonant that was alveolar in the first place. But from a vowel it seems like I have to pull of the side of the road to get through the trill without crashing. And for back vowels like the ‘u’ in ‘bush’ I don’t see any way around having to trill somehow further back on my tongue if I expect to be able to make it flow smoothly to the vowel.

What am I missing here? What are the expected co-articulation phenomena that people aren’t mentioning when they talk about how to trill?