Uvular r in Romanian

Keeping up with various broadcasts from Romania, I have started to notice more and more accents and registers of the language. One pronunciation aspect that has truly stood out lately is a uvular /r/, of the variety commonly identified with the French language, [ʀ] or [ʁ], heard instead of the usual Romanian /r/, [r] or [ɾ].

The first time I heard it from a reporter on the Antena 3 news, I immediately associated the pronunciation with one thing: a speech defect, having come across it in other languages. In this case, the change from [r] to [ʁ] is not limited to any one language. It's simply about being physically unable to pronounce an alveolar /r/, and so the person shifts the pronunciation to the back of the palate, with [r] becoming [ʁ] (or any of various uvular sounds); the speaker could be Italian, Spanish, Romanian, or just about a native speaker of any language in which the usual pronunciation for /r/ is alveolar.

The uvular trill gives Romanian a very distinct sound, one I was certainly unaccustomed to. I figured it was just one reporter on Romanian TV, and I didn't make much of it at the time.

Other Romance languages possess some type of a non-alveolar /r/, and their occurrences are well documented. In Spanish, it is heard in Puerto Rico—[x] commonly taking the place of [r] in most cases (the traditional /x/ phoneme is rendered [h]), i.e. carro ['kaxo]. In Portuguese, a non-alveolar pronunciation is the most common realization for /r/: [x], [ʀ], [ʁ], [χ], and [h] are all heard in different regions in the Portuguese-speaking world (though [r] itself is still heard in some places). In Italian, a uvular r can be heard from speakers in certain regions in the North of Italy. (See the Guttural R article on Wikipedia for a discussion).

Going back to Romanian. After that one reporter, I started noticing more and more people in the Romanian media speaking with a uvular r. My thoughts were: "Well, that's a coincidence—encountering another uvular r in such a short time." Then, I heard another news reporter in a different show. Then another in a different Romanian TV network. I felt rather astonished because the occurrence of this pronunciation seemed more normal in Romanian than I would've imagined.

I have not found research showing the existence of a possible regional pronunciation of /r/ as [ʁ] in the Romance language of the Balkans. I actually did not find much documented on the subject in Romanian. The only confirmation being that it is indeed regarded as a speech impediment—rotacism, regarded in the same fashion as a lisp. The Romanian Wikipedia briefly states, with regards to an alveolar trill, [r], contrasting it with a uvular one:

Acest tip de vibrantă este comun limbilor romanice, cu excepția notabilă a limbii franceze care folosește o altă vibrantă, [ʀ], o consoană vibrantă uvulară sau velară (r graseiat sau gutural).
Deși în mod standard consoana vibrantă din limbile română, italiană, rusă etc. se pronunță alveolar, unii vorbitori se obișnuiesc încă din primii ani ai vieții să o pronunțe uvular (graseiat) și mulți dintre ei continuă acest mod de articulare toată viața. Exemple celebre în acest sens sînt Nicolae Ceaușescu și Vladimir Ilici Lenin.

This type of trill is common in the Romance languages, the notable exception being French which uses another trill, [ʀ], a uvular or velar trill (a graseiat or guttural r).
Even though the standard pronunciation of the trill consonant in Romanian, Italian, Russian, etc., is an alveolar one, some speakers get used to pronouncing it in a uvular fashion (graseiat) at an early age, and many of these people retain this mode of articulation throughout their lives. Some famous examples in this sense are Nicolae Ceausescu and Vladimir Ilici Lenin.

A popular Romanian forum has an archived discussion about a mother who asks for advice concerning her daughter who is unable to pronounce an alveolar r and who instead uses an r graseiat (uvular). On her post, the mother talks about her visits to speech pathologists, asking the forum visitors if something can ultimately be done to correct her daughter's speech problem.
The posters respond by exposing their own inability to pronounce an alveolar r, and how they grew up using the uvular consonant. One particular person says that in her class, there were 5 people with this pronunciation feature (/r/ = [ʁ]). All the posters who claim to have this problem mention how they were all told by teachers and pathologists that they would have an easy time pronouncing and learning French. A few of them bring up how they can pronounce the English /r/ beautifully, but not the standard one in Romanian.

Could this pronunciation of /r/ simply be more common, and perhaps more accepted, in Romanian than in other Romance languages? Could it be truly perceived by Romanians as just a variation of the "lisp" only involving r?

In Spanish, for example, the only case of this uvular pronunciation of /r/ I have encountered recently in the media is that of a young Mexican girl who is unable to pronounce [r] at all, a sound which she replaces with [ʁ] or, at times, with [l] (at 1:03 in this clip, for example, she is heard pronouncing muerto de hambre as [mweʁto ðeãmbʁe], and consistently having [ʁ] for /r/ throughout the video). Because of this pronunciation defect, the cast in this Mexican show nicknamed her Telesa (her real name being Teresa). Therefore, just like in this little girl's case, having uvular r for all cases of /r/ is perceived socially as a speech defect, and, unlike what I've seen in the Romanian media, it is not common at all for anyone in any public broadcast to speak with that pronunciation (in fact, I've yet to hear anyone else in the public eye besides this Mexican girl).

To wrap things up, here's one more example of this type of r in Romanian—in the September 22 episode of the Romanian magazine show, Sinteza Zilei, there was a panel of six speakers. To my surprise, two of those six spoke with a graseiat, or guttural, r.

The two speakers can be heard at 30:00

So far, I haven't found anything that leads me to believe it is a regional or ethnic feature in Romania. For this reason, I'm curious to hear from Romanians themselves about their perception of this guttural r in their native language.

Aș vrea să știu ce vă gândiți voi, ca români, despre pronunțarea asta a r-ului. Puteți să răspundeți și în română. Mă puțeti ajuta ?