Voiceless dental and alveolar plosives

Voiceless alveolar and dental plosives (or stops) are a type of consonantal sound used in almost all spoken languages. The alveolar is familiar to English-speakers as the "t" sound in "stick".

The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents voiceless dental, alveolar, and postalveolar plosives is . The voiceless dental plosive can be distinguished with the underbridge diacritic, and the postalveolar with a retraction line, , and the extIPA has a double underline diacritic which can be used to explicitly specify an alveolar pronunciation, .

The sound is a very common sound cross-linguistically. Most languages have at least a plain , and some distinguish more than one variety. Some languages without a are colloquial Samoan (which also lacks an ), Abau, and NÃÂng of South Africa.

There are only a few languages which distinguish dental and alveolar stops (or often more precisely laminal and apical alveolar stops), including Kota, Toda, Venda and many Australian Aboriginal languages; certain varieties of Hiberno-English also distinguish them (with dental being the local realization of the Standard English phoneme spelled ).

Features

Features of a voiceless 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

Variable

Notes

References

External links