Voiceless dental plosive

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The voiceless dental plosive is a type of consonantal sound, used in some spoken languages. The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents this sound is t̪, and the equivalent X-SAMPA symbol is t_d. This is the symbol for the voiceless alveolar plosive with the "bridge below" diacritic meaning dental.

Features

Features of the voiceless dental 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 dental which means it is articulated with the tongue on either the lower or the upper teeth, or both.
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 center 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 dental plosive

IPA	Description
t̪	plain t̪
t̪ʰ	aspirated t̪
t̪ʲ	palatalized t̪
t̪ʷ	labialized t̪
t̪̚	unreleased t̪
t̪ʼ	ejective t̪

Occurrence

True dental consonants are relatively uncommon. In the Romance languages, /t/ is often called dental. However, the rearmost contact (which is what gives a consonant its distinctive sound) is actually alveolar, or perhaps denti-alveolar; the fact that the front of the tongue touches the teeth may be more visible, but is unimportant acoustically. The difference between the /t/ sounds of the Romance languages and English is not so much where the tongue contacts the roof of the mouth as which part of the tongue makes the contact. In English, it is the tip of the tongue (such sounds are termed apical), whereas in a number of Romance languages, it is the flat of the tongue just above the tip (such sounds are called laminal).

However, there are languages with true apical (or less commonly laminal) dental t. Many Indian languages, such as Hindi, have a two-way contrast between aspirated and plain [t̪]. In Finnish, the dental plosive /t/ contrasts with the alveolar plosive /d/, although the latter is typically voiced or tapped as a secondary cue; moreover, in native words, the alveolar plosive appears only as a lenition of the dental plosive. Pazeh contrasts a voiced alveolar plosive with a voiceless interdental one.Many Australian Aboriginal languages contrast alveolar and dental varieties of /t/.

Language		Word	IPA	Meaning	Notes
Arabic		کتب	[kɛ̈ˈt̪ɛ̈b]	'he wrote'	See Arabic phonology
Catalan		quatre	[ˈkwat̪ɾə]	'four'	See Catalan phonology
Dinka		mɛth		'child'
English	Indian	thin	[t̪ʰɪn]	'thin'	Some dialects. See English phonology
English	southern Irish	thin	[t̪ʰɪn]	'thin'	Some dialects. See English phonology
Finnish		tutti		'pacifier'	See Finnish phonology
Greek		Ματθαίος	[mat̪ˈθe̞o̞s̠]	'Matthew'	See Modern Greek phonology
Hindi		तीन	[t̪in]	'three'	See Hindi-Urdu phonology
Irish		dorcha		'dark'	See Irish phonology
Italian		tale		'such'	See Italian phonology
Pazeh		[mut̪apɛt̪aˈpɛh]		'keep clapping'
Polish		tom		'volume'	See Polish phonology
Portuguese		montanha		'mountain'	See Portuguese phonology
Russian		толстый		'fat'	See Russian phonology
Spanish		tener	[t̪̪e̞ˈne̞ɾ]	'to have'	See Spanish phonology
Turkish		at	[ät̪]	'horse'	See Turkish phonology

References

Bibliography