Voiced dental fricative

The voiced dental fricative is a consonant sound used in some spoken languages. It is familiar to English-speakers as the th sound in father. Its symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet is eth, or and was taken from the Old English and Icelandic letter eth, which could stand for either a voiced or unvoiced (inter)dental non-sibilant fricative. Such fricatives are often called "interdental" because they are often produced with the tongue between the upper and lower teeth (as in Received Pronunciation), and not just against the back of the upper teeth, as they are with other dental consonants.

The letter Template:Angbr IPA is sometimes used to represent the dental approximant, a similar sound, which no language is known to contrast with a dental non-sibilant fricative. However, the approximant can be explicitly indicated with the lowering diacritic: Template:Angbr IPA. Very rarely used variant transcriptions of the dental approximant include Template:Angbr IPA (retracted Template:IPAblink), Template:Angbr IPA (advanced Template:IPAblink) and Template:Angbr IPA (Template:Notatypo Template:IPAblink). It has been proposed that either a turned ⟨⟩ or reversed Template:Nowrap begin⟨⟩Template:Nowrap end be used as a dedicated symbol for the dental approximant, but despite occasional usage, this has not gained general acceptance.

The fricative and its unvoiced counterpart are rare phonemes. Almost all languages of Europe and Asia lack the sound. Native speakers of languages without the sound often have difficulty enunciating or distinguishing it, and they replace it with a voiced alveolar sibilant , a voiced dental stop or voiced alveolar stop , or a voiced labiodental fricative ; known respectively as th-alveolarization, th-stopping, and th-fronting. As for Europe, there seems to be a great arc where the sound (and/or its unvoiced variant) is present. Most of Mainland Europe lacks the sound. However, some "periphery" languages such as Greek have the sound in their consonant inventories, as phonemes or allophones.

Within Turkic languages, Bashkir and Turkmen have both voiced and voiceless dental non-sibilant fricatives among their consonants. Among Semitic languages, they are used in Modern Standard Arabic, albeit not by all speakers of modern Arabic dialects, and in some dialects of Hebrew and Assyrian.

Features

Features of the voiced dental non-sibilant fricative:

Template:Fricative It does not have the grooved tongue and directed airflow, or the high frequencies, of a sibilant. Template:Dental Template:Voiced Template:Oral Template:Central articulation Template:Pulmonic

Occurrence

In the following transcriptions, the undertack diacritic may be used to indicate an approximant .

Language		Word	IPA	Meaning	Notes
Albanian				'idol'
Aleut				'house'
Arabic	Modern Standard			'gold'	See Arabic phonology. Represented by the letter ḏāl.
	Gulf
	Najdi
	Tunisian				See Tunisian Arabic phonology
Arpitan	Template:Ill and Savoyard	Genèva		'Geneva'	Generally represents the "j" and "ge/gi" phonemes in standard spelling.
	Bressan	vachiére		'woman cow herder'	Bressan dialect, like the Geneva and many Savoy ones, express "j" and "ge/gi" (in standard Arpitan spelling) as voiced dental fricatives. In addition, however, its dialects often express the intervocalic "r" as such as well.
AromanianTemplate:Sfnp				'butter whey'	Corresponds to Template:IPAblink in standard Romanian. See Romanian phonology
Assyrian		ܘܪܕܐ werda	]	'flower'	Common in the Tyari, Barwari, and Western dialects. Corresponds to Template:IPAblink in other varieties.
Asturian	Some dialects			'to do'	Alternative realization of etymological Template:Angbr. Can also be realized as Template:IPAblink.
Bashkir		/	{{errorTemplate:Main other|Audio file "Ba-ҡаҙ.ogg" not found}}Template:Category handlerTemplate:Category handler	'goose'
Basque				'horn'	Allophone of
Berta				'to sweep'
Burmese				'inlander'	Commonly realized as an affricate Template:IPAblink.
Catalan				'each'	Fricative or approximant. Allophone of . See Catalan phonology
Cree	Woods Cree (th-dialect)			'I'	Reflex of Proto-Algonguian *r. Shares features of a sonorant.
Dahalo		Template:Example needed			Weak fricative or approximant. It is a common intervocalic allophone of , and may be simply a plosive Template:IPAblink instead.
Elfdalian				'wait'
Emilian	Bolognese	żänt		'people'
English	Received PronunciationTemplate:Sfnp	this		'this'
	Western American English		{{errorTemplate:Main other|Audio file "this-prounciation-audio-nonlabial.ogg" not found}}Template:Category handlerTemplate:Category handler		Interdental.Template:Sfnp
Extremaduran				'to do'	Realization of etymological 'z'. Can also be realized as
Fijian				'nine'
Galician	Some dialects			'to do'	Alternative realization of etymological Template:Angbr. Can also be realized as .
German	Austrian			'unfortunately'	Intervocalic allophone of in casual speech. See Standard German phonology
Greek		/ Template:Transliteration		'laurel'	See Modern Greek phonology
Gwich'in				'you want'
Hän				'hide'
Harsusi				'bee'
Hebrew	Iraqi		{{errorTemplate:Main other|Audio file "Athonai.ogg" not found}}Template:Category handlerTemplate:Category handler	'my lord'	Commonly pronounced Template:IPAblink. See Modern Hebrew phonology
	Temani	/ğaḏol		'large, great'	See Yemenite Hebrew
Judeo-Spanish	Many dialects	/		'creator'	Intervocalic allophone of in many dialects.
Kabyle				'to be exhausted'
Kagayanen				'spirit'
Kurdish		Template:Example needed			An approximant; postvocalic allophone of . See Kurdish phonology.
Malay	Standard	azan		'azan'	Only in Arabic loanwords; usually replaced with . See Malay phonology
Malayalam		'അത്'		'That'	Colloquial usage.
Mari	Eastern dialect			'lung'
Norman	Jèrriais			'mother'	Predominantly found in western Jèrriais dialects; otherwise realised as , and sometimes as or .
Northern Sámi				'science'
Norwegian	Meldal dialect			'in'	Syllabic palatalized frictionless approximant corresponding to in other dialects. See Norwegian phonology
Occitan	Gascon			'what I should'	Allophone of . See Occitan phonology
Portuguese	European			'nothing'	Northern and central dialects. Allophone of , mainly after an oral vowel. See Portuguese phonology
Sardinian			{{errorTemplate:Main other|Audio file "Sr-nidu.wav" not found}}Template:Category handlerTemplate:Category handler	'nest'	Allophone of
Scottish Gaelic	Many Outer Hebrides dialects			'Mary'	Often slightly palatalized. Common Hebridean realisation of /ɾʲ/, standard in Lewis and also common in Harris, Benbecula and South Uist; otherwise realized as , as Template:IPAblink in southern Barra, or as Template:IPAblink in Tiree.
Sioux	Lakota			'five'	Sometimes with
Spanish	Most dialects			'finger'	Ranges from close fricative to approximant. Allophone of . See Spanish phonology
Swahili				'sin'	Mostly occurs in Arabic loanwords originally containing this sound.
Swedish	Central Standard			'to take a bath'	An approximant; allophone of in casual speech. See Swedish phonology
	Some dialectsTemplate:Better source needed			'in'	A syllabic palatalized frictionless approximantTemplate:Better source needed corresponding to in Central Standard Swedish. See Swedish phonology
Syriac	Western Neo-Aramaic			'to take'
Tamil				'nine'	Intervocalic allophone of . See Tamil phonology
Tanacross				'liver'
Turkmen		ýyldyz		'star'	Realization of the phoneme
Tutchone	Northern			'hide'
	Southern
Venetian				'midday'
Welsh				'bard'	See Welsh phonology
Zapotec	Tilquiapan	Template:Example needed			Allophone of

Danish is actually a velarized alveolar approximant.

See also

• Voiced alveolar non-sibilant fricative
• Template:Section link
• Index of phonetics articles

References

• Template:SOWL

External links

• Template:Phoible