Dental consonant

A dental consonant is a consonant articulated with the tongue against the upper teeth, such as , . In some languages, dentals are distinguished from other groups, such as alveolar consonants, in which the tongue contacts the gum ridge. Dental consonants share acoustic similarity and in the Latin script are generally written with consistent symbols (e.g. t, d, n).

In the International Phonetic Alphabet, the diacritic for dental consonant is Template:Unichar. When there is no room under the letter, it may be placed above, using the character Template:Unichar, such as in . However, this has a different meaning in the Extensions to the IPA.

Cross-linguistically

In languages, such as Albanian, Irish and Russian, velarization is generally associated with more dental articulations of coronal consonants. Thus, velarized consonants, such as Albanian , tend to be dental or denti-alveolar, and non-velarized consonants tend to be retracted to an alveolar position.

Sanskrit, Hindustani and all other Indo-Aryan languages have an entire set of dental stops that occur phonemically as voiced and voiceless and with or without aspiration. The nasal also exists but is quite alveolar and apical in articulation. To native speakers, the English alveolar and sound more like the corresponding retroflex consonants of their languages than like dentals.

Spanish and are denti-alveolar, while and are prototypically alveolar but assimilate to the place of articulation of a following consonant. Likewise, Italian , , , are denti-alveolar (, , , and respectively) and and become denti-alveolar before a following dental consonant.

Although denti-alveolar consonants are often described as dental, it is the point of contact farthest to the back that is most relevant, defines the maximum acoustic space of resonance and gives a characteristic sound to a consonant. In French, the contact that is farthest back is alveolar or sometimes slightly pre-alveolar.

Occurrence

Dental/denti-alveolar consonants as transcribed by the International Phonetic Alphabet include:

IPA	Description	Example
		Language	Orthography	IPA	Meaning
	dental nasal	Russian	банк / bank		'bank'
	voiceless dental plosive	Finnish	tutti		'pacifier'
	voiced dental plosive	Arabic	دين / din		'religion'
	voiceless dental sibilant fricative	Polish	kosa		'scythe'
	voiced dental sibilant fricative	Polish	koza		'goat'
	voiceless dental nonsibilant fricative (also often called "interdental")	English	thing
	voiced dental nonsibilant fricative (also often called "interdental")	English	this
	dental approximant	Spanish	codo		'elbow'
	dental lateral approximant	Spanish	alto		'tall'
	dental ejective	Dahalo			'hair'
	voiced dental implosive	Sindhi	ڏسڻي		'forefinger'
	dental clicks (many different consonants)	Xhosa	ukúcola		'to grind fine'

See also

• Denti-alveolar consonant
• Place of articulation
• Index of phonetics articles