Voiceless dental and alveolar stops
| Voiceless alveolar stop | |
|---|---|
| t | |
| IPA number | 103 |
| Encoding | |
| Entity (decimal) | t |
| Unicode (hex) | U+0074 |
| X-SAMPA | t |
| Kirshenbaum | t |
| Braille |  |
| Sound | |
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| Voiceless dental stop | |
|---|---|
| t̪ | |
| Sound | |
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The voiceless alveolar stop is a type of consonantal sound used in many spoken languages. The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents voiceless dental, alveolar, and postalveolar stops is ⟨t⟩, and the equivalent X-SAMPA symbol is t. The dental stop can be distinguished with the underbridge diacritic, ⟨t̪⟩, 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 [t] sound is a very common sound cross-linguistically; the most common consonant phonemes of the world's languages are [t], [k] and [p]. Most languages have at least a plain [t], and some distinguish more than one variety. Some languages without a [t] are Hawaiian (except for Ni‘ihau; Hawaiian uses a voiceless velar stop [k] for loanwords with [t]), colloquial Samoan (which also lacks an [n]), and Nǁng of South Africa.
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