It seems that there’s an international trend of phasing the alveolar [r] out in favour of other forms of [r].
From my personal experience:
It used to be ubiquitous in Austria, but the younger generations prefer to imitate the German way of pronouncing it.
I hear that the above trend is also active in southern Sweden.
The Queen’s English used to have it, not long ago. Today, it’s considered overly posh to utter it. The current, internationally accepted R sound more like an A with some W mixed in, than anything else.
Greek tongues are getting increasingly lazy, and the trill has shortened so much during the past 20 years, that it sounds more like a T than a “proper” R.
I may be wrong here, but I have the impression that French also used to have an alveolar R a few centuries ago.
My interpretation is that trilling with the tip of your tongue is such a hassle that other forms of R will be readily adopted when it becomes socially acceptable.
Question 1: Are there any other languages where this is happening?
Question 2: Has there ever been a recorded instance of the reverse phenomenon, namely that the alveolar R replaces another form of R?
Do you mean the English/American alveolar approximant R, or the alveolar trilled R (like ‘rr’ in Spanish)? They’re both alveolar, but different sounds.
The trilled R is very common in other languages, and I don’t think it’s going anywhere.
I mean the “Spanish” variety.
What do you mean “it’s not going anywhere”? It has already disappeared from English, and is in the process of being phased out of German and a couple other languages.
As Hector explained, there was never a trill in English, just a flap or tap. (Modern Spanish has both – usually, one “r” is a flap or tap, except at the start of some words, while “rr” is a trill).
Clearly, the OP is asking about flaps and taps. It’s a good question. You do hear it in old French movies, and veddy proper British dramas, in the mouths of old people.
For the benefit of those who would like to know what you’re talking about, could you give a few examples? A quick google search resulted in “red”, which, last I checked, wasn’t going anywhere.
Section 1.1 of this thesis gives a good intro to the difficulties of classifying rhotics (“r-like sounds,” or perceived as such in a given language).
The typical modern English “r” sound is pretty rare among languages. (Mandarin Chinese happens to have a similar sound). Much more common are taps and flaps. Veddy veddy common, I’d say.
Retroflexes are less familiar to us, but millions of South Indians use them all day.
Surely there has been an occasion when the English/Mandarin sound has evolved into a tap, flap, trill, of retroflex, but I’ll let others hunt down a documented example.
Although, for unwritten languages especially, one would expect it more likely that an English/Mandarin r would instead evolve into another “liquid” (the “l” sound) or maybe “w.”
