phonetics Phonetics is a branch of linguistics that studies how humans produce and perceive sounds or, in the case of sign languages, the equivalent aspects of sign. Linguists who specialize in studying the physical properties of speech are phoneticians ...

and

phonology Phonology (formerly also phonemics or phonematics: "phonemics ''n.'' 'obsolescent''1. Any procedure for identifying the phonemes of a language from a corpus of data. 2. (formerly also phonematics) A former synonym for phonology, often pre ...

, an intervocalic consonant is a

consonant In articulatory phonetics, a consonant is a speech sound that is articulated with complete or partial closure of the vocal tract, except for the h sound, which is pronounced without any stricture in the vocal tract. Examples are and pronou ...

that occurs between two

vowel A vowel is a speech sound pronounced without any stricture in the vocal tract, forming the nucleus of a syllable. Vowels are one of the two principal classes of speech sounds, the other being the consonant. Vowels vary in quality, in loudness a ...

s. Intervocalic consonants are often associated with

lenition In linguistics, lenition is a sound change that alters consonants, making them "weaker" in some way. The word ''lenition'' itself means "softening" or "weakening" (from Latin 'weak'). Lenition can happen both synchronically (within a language ...

, a phonetic process that causes consonants to weaken and eventually disappear entirely. An example of such a change in English is '' intervocalic alveolar flapping'', a process (especially in North American and

Australian English Australian English (AusE, AusEng, AuE, AuEng, en-AU) is the set of variety (linguistics), varieties of the English language native to Australia. It is the country's common language and ''de facto'' national language. While Australia has no of ...

) that, impressionistically speaking, replaces /t/ with /d/. For example, "''metal''" is pronounced ; "''batter''" sounds like . (More precisely, both /t/ and /d/ are pronounced as the

alveolar tap The voiced alveolar tap or flap is a type of consonantal sound, used in some spoken languages. The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents a dental consonant, dental, alveolar consonant, alveolar, or postalveolar consonant, p ...

.) In North American English, the weakening is variable across word boundaries, such that the /t/ of "see you tomorrow" might be pronounced as either or . Some languages have intervocalic-weakening processes fully active word-internally and in connected discourse. For example, in Spanish, /d/ is regularly pronounced like in the words "" (meaning "all") and " ", meaning "the dune" (but if the word is pronounced alone).

References

Phonetics Phonology {{phonology-stub