The most common pronunciation of hi in Norwegian is as an apical alveolar tap, i.e. the tongue tip touches the alveolar ridge and makes a short closure phase. In a manual segmentation task [1] we thus assumed that the tongue movement for the alveolar tap is a symmetric one. In our segmentation of hi we therefore included 10ms on each side in addition to the segment of less intensity in the spectrogram to include the tongue tip movement. In this paper we will demonstrate that different phonemic contexts systematically affect the realisation of /r/ and how this leads to some exceptions from the lOms-addition-rule mentioned above.

Depending on the speaker's dialect background, the /r/-phoneme in Norwegian is produced as an apical tap or trill, a uvular tap or trill, or a post-palatal, velar or uvular fricative [2]. Recent studies [2] show a widespread and rapid change from an apical to a dorsal pronunciation of/r/ in South/West Norwegian dialects. Reasons for this ongoing change will be discussed.

Based on the annotated European multilingual EUROM.O speech database we will discuss hi pronunciations in different languages and how hi has been segmented.