The most difficult English sound for speakers of many languages is the ‘r’  sound. Though it is considered a single phoneme, that can occur in four different places.  It can occur as a consonant, as a vowel, and attached to vowels.  

The first row of the table is the sound of ‘r’ as a consonant.  We write it as an upside-down ‘r’ /ɹ/. This is the sound in words like, “red” /ɹɛd/,, or “tried” /tɹɑɪd/. 

A right-side-up ‘r’ /r/ is used to stand for the trilled ‘r’ that that occurs in many languages such as Spanish and Finish.  For instance Spanish “perro” /pero/ and Finnish “Hari” /hari/. 

The second and third rows are two ways of representing the same sound, a vocalic ‘r.’  Vocalic consonants are constants that act as a vowel and can be the core to a syllable. The sound is the ‘r’ sound in “bird,” “early,” “letter,” and “paper.”  The reason that there are two ways of representing the same sound is that same as for /ʌ/ and /e/, when the syllable is stressed, we write the sounds as /ɝ/, and when it is unstressed, we write it is ɚ/.  

The fourth, fifth, and sixth rows add an ‘ɹ’ symbol after the vowel to indicate that the vowel sound merges into the /ɚ/ sound similar to a diphthong.   Following is a list of the r-colored vowels. 

Three of the vowel sounds are written with two symbols, but /ɝ/ and /ɚ/ are not. They have been written as /ʌɹ/ and /əɹ/. However, that misses the fact that you are making the vowel sound and modifying it with the ‘r’ sound by curling back your tongue or bunching it up. Some linguists write /ɔɹ/, /ɑɹ/, and /ɛɹ/  as single symbols. Remember not to get too hung up on symbols because there is some variation. I try to be consistent on this website. 

1. Early morbid art is fairly rare. [ɝli mɔrbɪd ɑrt ɪz fɛrli ɹɛr]
2. The early bird catches the worm. [ðə ɝli bɝd kæt͡ʃz ðə wɝm̩]
3. The moon orbits the Earth. [ðə mun ɔrbɪts ðə ɝθ].
4. Air is necessary to breathe.