by French culture and language, was the use of guttural R in the nobility and in the upper classes of Stockholm. This phenomenon vanished in the 1900s. The last well-known non-Southerner who spoke with a guttural R, and did not have a speech defect, was Anders Gernandt, a popular equitation commentator on TV. Norwegian Most of Norway uses an alveolar flap, but about one third of the inhabitants of Norway, primarily in the South-West region, are now using the uvular rhotic. In the western and southern part of South Norway, the uvular rhotic is still spreading and includes all towns and coastal areas of Agder, most of Rogaland, large parts of Hordaland, and Sogn og Fjordane in and around Florø. The origin was the city of Bergen as well as Kristiansand in the 18th century. Because retroflex consonants are mutations of and other alveolar or dental consonants, the use of a uvular rhotic means an absence of most retroflex consonants. Icelandic In Icelandic, the uvular rhotic-like or is an uncommon deviation from the normal alveolar trill or flap, and is considered a speech disorder. Slavic languages In Slavic languages, the alveolar trill predominates, with the use of guttural rhotics seen as defective pronunciation. However, the uvular trill is common among the languages of the Sorbian minority in Saxony, eastern Germany, likely due to German influence. The uvular rhotic may also be found in a small minority in Silesia and other German-influenced regions of Poland and also Slovenia, but is overall quite rare even in these regions. It can also be perceived as an ethnic marker of Jewishness, particularly in Russian where Eastern European Jews often carried the uvular rhotic from their native Yiddish into their pronunciation of Russian. Semitic languages Hebrew In Hebrew, the consonant Gimel () without a dagesh was associated with the Guttural R. In Hebrew, the classical pronunciation associated with the consonant () was flapped , and was grammatically treated as an ungeminable phoneme of the language. In most dialects of Hebrew among the Jewish diaspora, it remained a flap or a trill . However, in some Ashkenazi dialects as preserved among Jews in northern Europe it was a uvular rhotic, either a trill or a fricative . This was because many (but not all) native dialects of Yiddish were spoken that way, and their liturgical Hebrew carried the same pronunciation. Some Iraqi Jews also pronounce as