Dental consonant

Dental
◌̪

Places of articulation
Labial     Bilabial         Labial–velar         Labial–coronal     Labiodental Bidental Coronal     Linguolabial     Interdental     Dental     Denti-alveolar     Alveolar     Coronal–velar     Postalveolar         Palato-alveolar         Retroflex Dorsal     Postalveolar         Alveolo-palatal     Palatal         Labial–palatal     Velar     Uvular         Uvular–epiglottal Laryngeal (Guttural)     Pharyngeal/Epiglottal     Glottal Peripheral
Tongue shape
Apical Subapical Laminal Sulcal Domed
Secondary articulation
Labialization (Rounding) Palatalization     Labio-palatalization Velarization Uvularization Pharyngealization
See also
Articulatory phonetics Coarticulation Double articulation Glottalization Manner of articulation

A dental consonant is a consonant articulated with the tongue against the upper teeth, such as /t/, /d/, /n/, and /l/ in some languages. Dentals are usually distinguished from sounds in which contact is made with the tongue and the gum ridge, as in English (see alveolar consonant) because of the acoustic similarity of the sounds and the fact that in the Roman alphabet, they are generally written using the same symbols (like t, d, n).

In the International Phonetic Alphabet, the diacritic for dental consonant is U+032A ◌̪ COMBINING BRIDGE BELOW.

Cross-linguistically

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

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

Spanish /t/ and /d/ are denti-alveolar, while /l/ and /n/ are prototypically alveolar but assimilate to the place of articulation of a following consonant. Likewise, Italian /t/, /d/, /t͡s/, /d͡z/ are denti-alveolar ([t̪], [d̪], [t̪͡s̪], and [d̪͡z̪] respectively) and /l/ and /n/ 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	[ban̪k]	'bank'
	voiceless dental stop	Finnish	tutti	[t̪ut̪t̪i]	'pacifier'
	voiced dental stop	Arabic	دين	[d̪iːn]	'religion'
s̪	voiceless dental sibilant fricative	Polish	kosa	[kɔs̪a]	'scythe'
z̪	voiced dental sibilant fricative	Polish	koza	[kɔz̪a]	'goat'
	voiceless dental nonsibilant fricative (also often called "interdental")	English	thing	[θɪŋ]
	voiced dental nonsibilant fricative (also often called "interdental")	English	this	[ðɪs]
	dental approximant	Spanish	codo	[koð̞o]	'elbow'
	dental lateral approximant	Spanish	alto	[al̪t̪o]	'tall'
	dental trill	Hungarian	ró	[r̪oː]	'to carve'
	dental ejective
	voiced dental implosive
	dental click	Xhosa	ukúcola	[ukʼúkǀola]	'to grind fine'

See also

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

Sources

• Ladefoged, Peter; Maddieson, Ian (1996). The Sounds of the World's Languages. Oxford: Blackwell. ISBN 0-631-19814-8.
• Martínez-Celdrán, Eugenio; Fernández-Planas, Ana Ma.; Carrera-Sabaté, Josefina (2003), "Castilian Spanish", Journal of the International Phonetic Association, 33 (2): 255–259, doi:10.1017/S0025100303001373
• Recasens, Daniel; Espinosa, Aina (2005), "Articulatory, positional and coarticulatory characteristics for clear /l/ and dark /l/: evidence from two Catalan dialects", Journal of the International Phonetic Association, 35 (1): 1–25, doi:10.1017/S0025100305001878
• Rogers, Derek; d'Arcangeli, Luciana (2004), "Italian", Journal of the International Phonetic Association, 34 (1): 117–121, doi:10.1017/S0025100304001628
• Real Academia Española; Association of Spanish Language Academies (2011), Nueva Gramática de la lengua española (English: New Grammar of the Spanish Language), 3 (Fonética y fonología), Espasa, ISBN 978-84-670-3321-2