Voiceless dental and alveolar plosives

Voiceless alveolar and dental plosives (or stops) are a type of consonantal sound used in almost all spokenlanguages. The alveolar is familiar to English-speakers as the ⟨t⟩ sound in stick.

The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents voiceless dental, alveolar, and postalveolarplosives is ⟨t⟩. The voiceless dental plosive can be distinguished with the underbridge diacritic ⟨t̪⟩, and the postalveolar with a retraction line, ⟨t̠⟩. The extIPA also has a double underline diacritic which can be used to explicitly specify an alveolar pronunciation, ⟨t͇⟩.

The [t] sound is a very common sound cross-linguistically. Most languages have at least a plain [t], and some distinguish more than one variety. Some languages without a [t] are colloquial Samoan (which also lacks an [n]), Abau, and Nǁng of South Africa.

There are only a few languages which distinguish dental and alveolar stops (or often more precisely laminal and apical alveolar stops), including Kota, Toda, Venda and many Australian Aboriginal languages; certain varieties of Hiberno-English also distinguish them (with dental [t̪] being the local realization of the Standard English phoneme /θ/ spelled ⟨th⟩).

Languages like Hindi, Bengali and Punjabi have this [t̪] sound. Hindi, Bengali and Punjabi also have aspirated versions of [t̪], which is usually written as t̪ʰ.