The voiceless alveolar, dental and postalveolar plosives (or stops) are types of consonantal sounds used in almost all spoken languages. The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents voiceless dental, alveolar, and postalveolar plosives is ⟨t⟩, and the equivalent X-SAMPA symbol is. The voiceless dental plosive can be distinguished with the underbridge diacritic, ⟨t̪⟩ and the postalveolar with a retraction line, ⟨t̠⟩, and the Extensions to the IPA have a double underline diacritic which can be used to explicitly specify an alveolar pronunciation, ⟨t͇⟩. 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, Toda, Venda and many Australian Aboriginal languages being a few of them; certain varieties of Hiberno-English also distinguish them (with [t̪] being the local realisation of the Standard English phoneme /θ/, represented by ⟨th⟩).

Features

Here are features of the voiceless alveolar stop:

Varieties

Occurrence

Dental or denti-alveolar

Alveolar

Postalveolar

Variable