Flap that!

Imagine you’re walking down a sunny street in Chicago and pass by a construction site. Someone yells out, “Adam, the ladder, pick it up!” Congratulations, you’ve just found the elusive wild flap in its natural environment! And not just once, but three times.  Where was it? “Adam, the ladder, pick it up!” Try saying it aloud. If you’re a native speaker of American English, you’ll say all three of the underlined sounds the same way.

Unless you’re already pretty familiar with linguistics, you’ve probably never heard of the flap (or tap, as some linguists call it), but that doesn’t mean that you’re not already acquainted. In fact, the flap is one of most common sounds of the English language, especially American English. It’s produced by a very quick movement of the tongue against the little ridge of bone just behind your teeth. This video will give you an idea of just how quick:

It’s a little difficult to see, but did you notice that bit in the middle where the tongue suddenly jumped? That was the flap. It’s so fast that it makes the production of most other sounds seem like the proverbial tortoise. A flap takes an average of 20 milliseconds to produce; by contrast, the schwa vowel (it’s an ‘uh’ sound, the most common in the English Language) lasts an average of 64 milliseconds.  You can see why the flap is such a favorite; it’s a huge time saver.

It’s a little difficult to spot a flap  within specialized training because it doesn’t have its own letter, or make any minimal pairs. (A minimal pair is a pair of words that differ by only one sound, like “cat” and “cap”. Because you need to be able to tell the sounds apart in order to tell the words apart, you’re really good at distinguishing the sounds that make minimal pairs, at least in your native language[s]). Usually, it replaces the ‘t’ or ‘d’ sound in the middle of a word, but when you start speaking more quickly, more and more of your ‘t’s and ‘d’s end up coming out as flaps. And that makes sense. When you’re speaking more quickly, you want to be understood, but you just  don’t have as much time to articulate quickly. Since most people will hear the flap as a ‘t’ or a ‘d’, switching one for the other is just easier for everyone.

So that’s the flap, a shy, unassuming sound that you often mistake for one of its more glamorous siblings. Now that you’ve been introduced, though, try to keep an eye out for the little guy. You just might be surprised how often it pops up!