Voiceless alveolar plosive

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The voiceless alveolar plosive is a type of consonantal sound used in many spoken languages. The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents voiceless dental, alveolar, and postalveolar plosives is t, and the equivalent X-SAMPA symbol is t. The dental version can be distinguished with the underbridge diacritic (t̪; see voiceless dental plosive), and the Extended IPA has a double underline diacritic which can be used to explicitly specify an alveolar pronunciation (t͇).

The [t] sound is a very common sound cross-linguistically; the most common consonant phonemes of the world's languages are [t], [k] and [p]. Most languages have at least a plain [t], and some distinguish more than one variety. The only languages known without a [t] are Hawaiian (outside of Ni‘ihau; Hawaiian uses a glottal stop as a 'replacement'), and colloquial Samoan, which also lacks an [n].

Features

Features of the voiceless alveolar plosive:

Its manner of articulation is plosive or stop, which means it is produced by obstructing airflow in the vocal tract.
Its place of articulation is alveolar, which means it is articulated with either the tip or the blade of the tongue against the alveolar ridge, termed respectively apical and laminal.
Its phonation type is voiceless, which means it is produced without vibrations of the vocal cords.
It is an oral consonant, which means air is allowed to escape through the mouth.
It is a central consonant, which means it is produced by allowing the airstream to flow over the middle of the tongue, rather than the sides.
The airstream mechanism is pulmonic egressive, which means it is articulated by pushing air out of the lungs and through the vocal tract, rather than from the glottis or the mouth.

Varieties of the voiceless alveolar plosive

IPA	Description
t	tenuis t
tʰ	aspirated t
tʲ	palatalized t
tʷ	labialized t
ⁿt	prenasalized t
tˁ	pharyngealized t
t̚	unreleased t
tʼ	ejective t

Occurrence

Language	Word	IPA	Meaning	Notes
Czech	toto		'this'	See Czech phonology
Dutch	taal	[taːl]	'language'	See Dutch phonology
English	tick		'tick'	See English phonology
Finnish	parta		'beard'	See Finnish phonology
French	tordu		'crooked'	See French phonology
German	Tochter		'daughter'	See German phonology
Greek	τρία		'three'	See Modern Greek phonology
Hungarian	tutaj		'raft'	See Hungarian phonology
Japanese	特別/tokubetsu		'special'	See Japanese phonology
Mandarin	大/dà		'big'	Contrasts with aspirated form. See Standard Mandarin
Norwegian	tann		'tooth'	See Norwegian phonology
Swedish	tåg	[ˈtʰoːg]	'train'	See Swedish phonology
Thai	ตา	[taː]	'eye'
Vietnamese	ti		'flaw, defect'	See Vietnamese phonology

Voiceless alveolar plosive

Features

Varieties of the voiceless alveolar plosive

Occurrence

See also