Interdental consonants are produced by placing the tip of the tongue between the upper and lower front teeth. That differs from
dental consonants, which are
articulated with the tongue against the ''back'' of the upper incisors. No language is known to contrast interdental and dental consonants.
Interdental consonants may be transcribed with the
extIPA
The Extensions to the International Phonetic Alphabet for Disordered Speech, commonly abbreviated extIPA , are a set of letters and diacritics devised by the International Clinical Phonetics and Linguistics Association to augment the Internatio ...
subscript, plus superscript bridge, as in , if precision is required, but it is more common to transcribe them as advanced alveolars, as in .
Interdental consonants are rare cross-linguistically. Interdental realisations of otherwise-dental or alveolar consonants may occur as idiosyncrasies or as coarticulatory effects of a neighbouring interdental sound. The most commonly-occurring interdental consonants are the non-
sibilant
Sibilants are fricative consonants of higher amplitude and pitch, made by directing a stream of air with the tongue towards the teeth. Examples of sibilants are the consonants at the beginning of the English words ''sip'', ''zip'', ''ship'', and ...
fricatives (sibilants may be dental but do not appear as interdentals). Apparently, interdentals do not contrast with dental consonants in any language.
Voiced and voiceless interdental fricatives appear in
American English
American English, sometimes called United States English or U.S. English, is the set of variety (linguistics), varieties of the English language native to the United States. English is the Languages of the United States, most widely spoken lan ...
as the initial sounds of words like 'then' and 'thin'. In
British English, the consonants are more likely to be dental .
An interdental occurs in some varieties of
Italian, and it may also occur in some varieties of English though the distribution and the usage of interdental in English are not clear.
s are found in about a dozen
Philippine languages, including
Kagayanen (
Manobo branch), Karaga
Mandaya (
Mansakan branch),
Kalagan (
Mansakan branch),
Southern Catanduanes Bicolano, and several varieties of
Kalinga,
as well as in the
Bauchi languages of Nigeria.
[Roger Blench]
Recent research in the languages of Northwest Nigeria: new languages, unknown sounds
Jos Linguistic Circle, 2011.
Interdental occurs in some dialects of
Amis Amis may refer to:
* Amis (surname)
* Amis people (or ''Amis''), a tribe of Taiwanese aborigines
* Amis language, an indigenous language of Taiwan
* AMIS (ISP), an Internet service provider (ISP) in Slovenia and Croatia
* Amis et Amiles, an old ...
.
Mapuche has interdental , , and .
In most
Indigenous Australian languages, there is a series of "dental" consonants, written ''th'', ''nh'', and (in some languages) ''lh''. They are always
laminal
A laminal consonant is a phone (speech sound) produced by obstructing the air passage with the blade of the tongue, the flat top front surface just behind the tip of the tongue in contact
with upper lip, teeth, alveolar ridge, to possibly, as ...
(pronounced by touching with the blade of the tongue) but may be formed in one of three different ways, depending on the language, the speaker, and how carefully the speaker pronounces the sound. They are apical interdental with the ''tip'' of the tongue visible between the teeth, as in ''th'' in American English; laminal interdental with the tip of the tongue down behind the lower teeth, so that the ''blade'' is visible between the teeth; and
denti-alveolar , that is, with both the tip and the blade making contact with the back of the upper teeth and alveolar ridge, as in French ''t'', ''d'', ''n'', ''l''.
See also
*
Bidental consonant
References
*
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Phonetics
Coronal consonants