Voiced dental and alveolar plosives

Voiced alveolar and dental plosives (or stops) are a type of consonantal sound used in many spoken languages. The alveolar is familiar to English-speakers as the "d" sound in "adore".

The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents voiced dental, alveolar and postalveolar plosives is ; the diacritic in can be used to distinguish the dental.

There are only a few languages that distinguish dental and alveolar stops (or often more precisely laminal and apical alveolar stops), among them Kota, Toda, Venda and some Irish dialects.

Features

Features of a voiced alveolar stop:

There are three specific variants of :
Dental, which means it is articulated with either the tip or the blade of the tongue at the upper teeth, termed respectively apical and laminal.
Denti-alveolar, which means it is articulated with the blade of the tongue at the alveolar ridge, and the tip of the tongue behind upper teeth.
Alveolar, which means it is articulated with either the tip or the blade of the tongue at the alveolar ridge, termed respectively apical and laminal.

Occurrence

Dental or denti-alveolar

Alveolar

Postalveolar

To distinguish from the voiced dental and alveolar plosives, a voiced postalveolar plosive can be transcribed as . A more explicit (though convoluted) transcription , using a combination of extIPA and obsolete diacritics, can also be used.

Variable

Notes

References

External links