Voiceless dental fricative

The voiceless dental non-sibilant fricative is a type of consonantal sound used in some spoken languages. It is familiar to most English speakers as the 'th' in think. Though rather rare as a phoneme among the world's languages, it is encountered in some of the most widespread and influential ones. The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents this sound is Template:Angbr IPA, and the equivalent X-SAMPA symbol is T. The IPA symbol is the lowercase Greek letter theta, which is used for this sound in post-classical Greek, and the sound is thus often referred to as "theta".

The dental non-sibilant fricatives are often called "interdental" because they are often produced with the tongue between the upper and lower teeth, and not just against the back of the upper or lower teeth, as they are with other dental consonants.

This sound and its voiced counterpart are rare phonemes, occurring in 4% of languages in a phonological analysis of 2,155 languages. Among the more than 60 languages with over 10 million speakers, only English, northern varieties of the Berber languages of North Africa, Standard Peninsular Spanish, various dialects of Arabic, Swahili (in words derived from Arabic), and Greek have the voiceless dental non-sibilant fricative. Speakers of languages and dialects without the sound sometimes have difficulty producing or distinguishing it from similar sounds, especially if they have had no chance to acquire it in childhood, and typically replace it with a voiceless alveolar fricative () (as in Indonesian), voiceless dental stop (), or a voiceless labiodental fricative (); known respectively as th-alveolarization, th-stopping, and th-fronting.

The sound is known to have disappeared from a number of languages, e.g. from most of the Germanic languages or dialects, where it is retained only in Scots, English, and Icelandic, but it is alveolar in the last of these. Among non-Germanic Indo-European languages as a whole, the sound was also once much more widespread, but is today preserved in a few languages including the Brythonic languages, Peninsular Spanish, Galician, Venetian, Tuscan, Albanian, some Occitan dialects and Greek. It has likewise disappeared from many modern vernacular varieties of Arabic, like Egyptian Arabic. Standard Arabic, and various dialects like Mesopotamian Arabic still retain the sound and its voiced counterpart .

Features

Features of the voiceless 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:Voiceless Template:Oral Template:Central articulation Template:Pulmonic

Occurrence

Language		Word	IPA	Meaning	Notes
Albanian				'says'
Arabic	Modern Standard		{{errorTemplate:Main other|Audio file "Ar-ثوب.ogg" not found}}Template:Category handlerTemplate:Category handler	'a dress'	Represented by Template:Angbr. See Arabic phonology.
	Eastern Libya			'three'
	Sanaa, YemenTemplate:Full citation needed			'it is priced'
	Iraq			'eight'
	Khuzestan, Iran			'the second one'
Aragonese				'bush'
Arapaho				'five'
Arpitan	Template:Ill and Savoyard	marchiê		'market'
	Template:Ill	èthêla		'star'
	Template:Ill	cllâf		'key'	Limited to Template:Ill (VD), Bourg-Saint-Pierre (VS), and a few other villages.
Assyrian		ܒܝܬܐ bèṭa		'house'	Mostly used in the Western, Barwari, Tel Keppe, Batnaya and Alqosh dialects; realized as Template:IPAblink in other varieties.
Asturian				'juice'
Avestan		xšaθra		'kingdom'	Ancient dead sacred language.
Bashkir			{{errorTemplate:Main other|Audio file "Ba-дуҫ.ogg" not found}}Template:Category handlerTemplate:Category handler	'friend'
Berber				'Berber (language)'(noun)	This pronunciation is common in northern Morocco, central Morocco, and northern Algeria.
Berta				'to eat'
Burmese		/ thon:		'three'	Commonly realized as an affricate Template:IPAblink.
Cornish				'eight'
Emiliano-Romagnol				'face'
English	Most dialects	thin	{{errorTemplate:Main other|Audio file "thin-pronunciation-nonlabial-audio.ogg" not found}}Template:Category handlerTemplate:Category handler	'thin'	See English phonology
Galician	Most dialects			'zero'	Merges with into Template:IPAblink in Western dialects. See Galician phonology
Greek				'sea'	See Modern Greek phonology
Gweno				'eye'
Gwich’in				'pants'
Halkomelem				'tree'
Hän				'I want'
Harsusi				'two'
Hebrew	Iraqi			'Hebrew' (language)	See Modern Hebrew phonology
	Yemenite
Hlai	Basadung			'one'
Italian	Tuscan			'the captains'	Intervocalic allophone of . See Italian phonology and Tuscan gorgia
Kabyle				'light'(noun)
Karen	Sgaw	သၢ		'three'
Karuk		yiθa		'one'
Kickapoo		neθwi		'three'
Kwama				'to laugh'
Leonese		ceru		'zero'
Lorediakarkar				'four'
Malay				'Tuesday'	Mostly occurs in Arabic loanwords originally containing this sound, but the writing is not distinguished from the Arabic loanwords with the sound and this sound must be learned separately by the speakers. See Malay phonology.
Massa				'five'
Occitan	Gascon	macipon		'(male) child'	Limited the sub-dialects of the region of Castillonais, in the Ariège department.
	Vivaro-Alpine	chin		'dog'	Limited to Vénosc, in the Isère department.
Old Persian		xšāyaθiya		'king'	This sound does not occur in modern Persian.
Saanich		TÁŦES		'eight'
Sardinian	Nuorese			'meat'
Scottish Gaelic	Tayinloan and Jura			'stream'	Dialectal allophone of before in certain Argyll dialects.
Shark Bay				'four'
Shawnee				'three'
Sioux	Nakoda	ktusa		'four'
Spanish	European			'to hunt'	Interdental. See Spanish phonology and Seseo. This sound is not contrastive in the Americas, southern Andalusia or the Canary Islands.
	Castilian			'wall'	Word-final, especially in Madrid. Corresponds to in standard Spanish.
Swahili				'value'	Mostly occurs in Arabic loanwords originally containing this sound.
Tanacross				'embers'
Toda				'nine'
Turkmen		sen		'you'	Realization of the /z/ phoneme
Tutchone	Northern			'pants'
	Southern
Upland Yuman	Havasupai			'five'
	Hualapai
	Yavapai
Venetian	Eastern dialects			'five'	Corresponds to in other dialects.
Wolaytta				'flower'
Welsh				'seven'
Zhuang				'language'
Zotung	Standard dialect of Lungngo	kacciade		'I go'	Realized as and in Aikap and other Northern dialects. It can also be voiced depending on the preceding consonant.

Voiceless denti-alveolar sibilant

The voiceless denti-alveolar sibilant is the only sibilant fricative in some dialects of Andalusian Spanish. It has no official symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet, though its features would be transcribed Template:Angbr IPA or Template:Angbr IPA (using the Template:Angbr IPA, the diacritic marking a laminal consonant, and Template:Angbr IPA, the diacritic marking a dental consonant). It is usually represented by an ad-hoc symbol such as Template:Angbr IPA, Template:Angbr IPA, or Template:Angbr IPA (advanced diacritic).

Template:Harvcoltxt describes this sound as follows: " is a voiceless, corono-dentoalveolar groove fricative, the so-called s coronal or s plana because of the relatively flat shape of the tongue body.... To this writer, the coronal , heard throughout Andalusia, should be characterized by such terms as "soft," "fuzzy," or "imprecise," which, as we shall see, brings it quite close to one variety of ... Canfield has referred, quite correctly, in our opinion, to this as "the lisping coronal-dental," and Amado Alonso remarks how close it is to the post-dental , suggesting a combined symbol to represent it".

Features

Features of the voiceless denti-alveolar sibilant:

• Its place of articulation is denti-alveolar, which means it is articulated with a flat tongue against the alveolar ridge and upper teeth.
• It is normally laminal, which means it is pronounced with the blade of the tongue.

Occurrence

Language		Word	IPA	Meaning	Notes
Spanish	Andalusian			'house'	Present in dialects with ceceo. See Spanish phonology

See also

• Voiced dental fricative
• Voiceless alveolar non-sibilant fricative
• Voiced dental sibilant
• Voiceless alveolar retracted sibilant
• Sibilant consonant#Possible combinations
• Pronunciation of English th
• Index of phonetics topics

References

• Template:SOWL

External links

• Template:Phoible
• Discrimination of Unvoiced Fricatives using Machine Learning Methods