Socio-geographical variation of /r/ in standard Dutch

The As. point out that almost all variants of /r/ found in the languages of the world, are observed in the Dutch language area, even in the standard language. They report on the results of a reading experiment with Dutch language teachers in the Netherlands and Flanders. Inter- and intraspeaker variation turn out to be high which indicates that many speakers do no have a clearly defined target standard realisation. As expected, more variation shows up in the Netherlands than in Flanders. However, the speaker variation is mainly limited to manner of articulation. There is only a very small number of speakers showing variation in the place of articulation of /r/, i.e. having both front and back realisations