The voiceless alveolar, dental and postalveolar plosives (or stops) are types of

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 ...

al sounds used in almost all spoken

language Language is a structured system of communication that consists of grammar and vocabulary. It is the primary means by which humans convey meaning, both in spoken and signed language, signed forms, and may also be conveyed through writing syste ...

s. The symbol in the

International Phonetic Alphabet The International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) is an alphabetic system of phonetic notation based primarily on the Latin script. It was devised by the International Phonetic Association in the late 19th century as a standard written representation ...

that represents voiceless dental, alveolar, and postalveolar plosives is , and the equivalent X-SAMPA symbol is t. 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 Nǁng of South Africa. There are only a few languages which distinguish dental and alveolar stops, Kota, Toda, Venda and many

Australian Aboriginal languages The Indigenous languages of Australia number in the hundreds, the precise number being quite uncertain, although there is a range of estimates from a minimum of around 250 (using the technical definition of 'language' as non-mutually intellig ...

being a few of them; certain varieties of

Hiberno-English Hiberno-English or Irish English (IrE), also formerly sometimes called Anglo-Irish, is the set of dialects of English native to the island of Ireland. In both the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland, English is the first language in e ...

also distinguish them (with being the local realisation of the Standard English phoneme , represented by ⟨th⟩).

Features

Here are features of the 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''.

Varieties

Occurrence

Dental or denti-alveolar

Alveolar

Postalveolar

Variable

Notes

References

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

External links

* {{DEFAULTSORT:Voiceless Alveolar stop Alveolar consonants Pulmonic consonants Voiceless oral consonants Central consonants