The alveolar tap or flap is a type of consonantal sound, used in some spoken languages.

Features of the alveolar tap:

The typical standard Finnish realization is actually more of an alveolar tap rather than a true voiced plosive, and the dialectal realization varies widely; see main article.

French and Haitian Creole pronounce the r as a uvular approximant; thus, their speakers can have great difficulties with the alveolar tap or trill of Spanish.

'Rhotacism' may refer to several phenomena related to the usage of the consonant 'r' (whether as an alveolar tap, alveolar trill, or the rarer uvular trill).

For this reason, current IPA transcriptions of these sounds by linguists working on the language consist of an alveolar lateral followed by a superscript alveolar tap and a retroflex lateral followed by a superscript retroflex tap.

Being "R-like" is an elusive and ambiguous concept phonetically and the same sounds that function as rhotics in some systems may pattern with fricatives, semivowels or even stops in others-for example, "tt" in American English "better" is often pronounced as an alveolar tap, a rhotic consonant in many other languages.

Teo lacks the alveolar flap, and Singer the retroflex flap.

Most of Norway uses an alveolar flap, but about one third of the inhabitants of Norway are now using the uvular rhotic.

In words where the T is not the first sound in the word and is followed by a short vowel, it may instead become an alveolar flap (for example, the intervocalic t in butter or neater).

Although called varenyky in standard Ukrainian, speakers of the Canadian Ukrainian or Rusyn dialect refer to them as pyrohy, which can be misheard pedaheh or pudaheh by Anglophones unaccustomed to the rolled-r sound, or alveolar flap.

McIntosh described /r/ as "a voiced retroflex alveolar flap" and /z/ as "backed alveolar . . . somewhat retroflex"; "backed alveolar" seems to correspond to the term "postalveolar" in more modern phoneticians' jargon.

There are still notable exceptions to this rule as well: proper nouns seem to be exempt (Occitan is pronounced as if it were Occidan, with an alveolar flap, in American English; meanwhile, Canton is still pronounced with a true t, despite it being followed by a reduced vowel and an n).