The voiceless alveolar, dental and postalveolar plosives (or stops) are types of

consonant In articulatory phonetics, a consonant is a speech sound that is articulated with complete or partial closure of the vocal tract. Examples are and pronounced with the lips; and pronounced with the front of the tongue; and pronounced ...

al sounds used in almost all spoken

language Language is a structured system of communication. The structure of a language is its grammar and the free components are its vocabulary. Languages are the primary means by which humans communicate, and may be conveyed through a variety of ...

s. The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents voiceless dental, alveolar, and

postalveolar Postalveolar or post-alveolar consonants are consonants articulated with the tongue near or touching the ''back'' of the alveolar ridge. Articulation is farther back in the mouth than the alveolar consonants, which are at the ridge itself, but no ...

plosives is , and the equivalent

X-SAMPA The Extended Speech Assessment Methods Phonetic Alphabet (X-SAMPA) is a variant of SAMPA developed in 1995 by John C. Wells, professor of phonetics at University College London. It is designed to unify the individual language SAMPA alphabets, a ...

symbol is t. The voiceless dental plosive can be distinguished with the underbridge diacritic, and the postalveolar with a retraction line, , and the Extensions to the IPA have a double underline diacritic which can be used to explicitly specify an alveolar pronunciation, . The sound is a very common sound cross-linguistically. Most languages have at least a plain , and some distinguish more than one variety. Some languages without a are colloquial Samoan (which also lacks an ), Abau, and Nǁng of South Africa. There are only a few languages which distinguish dental and alveolar stops,

Kota Kota or KOTA may refer to: People and languages *Kōta (given name), a masculine Japanese given name *Kota Brahmin, a sub-caste of Brahmins in Karnataka *Kota people (India), a tribe in the Nilgiri hills of Tamil Nadu, South India **Kota language ...

, Toda,

Venda Venda () was a Bantustan in northern South Africa, which is fairly close to the South African border with Zimbabwe to the north, while to the south and east, it shared a long border with another black homeland, Gazankulu. It is now part of the ...

and many Australian Aboriginal languages being a few of them.

Features

Here are features of the voiceless alveolar stop: * There are three specific variants of : ** Dental, which means it is articulated with either the tip or the blade of the tongue at the upper

teeth A tooth ( : teeth) is a hard, calcified structure found in the jaws (or mouths) of many vertebrates and used to break down food. Some animals, particularly carnivores and omnivores, also use teeth to help with capturing or wounding prey, te ...

, termed respectively '' apical'' and ''

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 ...

''. ** Denti-alveolar, which means it is articulated with the blade of the tongue at the

alveolar ridge The alveolar process () or alveolar bone is the thickened ridge of bone that contains the tooth sockets on the jaw bones (in humans, the maxilla and the mandible). The structures are covered by gums as part of the oral cavity. The synonymous ...

, and the tip of the tongue behind upper teeth. ** Alveolar, which means it is articulated with either the tip or the blade of the tongue at the alveolar ridge, termed respectively ''apical'' and ''laminal''.

Varieties

Occurrence

Dental or denti-alveolar

Alveolar

Variable

Notes

References

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

External links

* {{DEFAULTSORT:Voiceless Alveolar stop Alveolar consonants Pulmonic consonants Voiceless oral consonants Central consonants