Comment by iib
Made me think of this SMBC comic[1], where there's a debate if being in English or Spanish, each with around a billion speakers, makes it rare or not.
Made me think of this SMBC comic[1], where there's a debate if being in English or Spanish, each with around a billion speakers, makes it rare or not.
It depends on whether you define "rare" in terms of language variety or human variety, obviously. In terms of languages, it is a relatively rare phoneme. It occurs more often as an allophone of other phonemes, but in that case the speakers may not be able to distinguish it and will struggle to reproduce it in "unusual" environments.