Dental consonant

Dental
◌̪

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.

For many languages, such as Albanian, Irish or Russian, velarization is generally associated with more dental articulations of coronal consonants so that velarized consonants (such as Albanian /ɫ/) tend to be dental or denti-alveolar, whereas 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 in these languages, but is quite alveolar and apical in articulation. To the Indian speaker, the alveolar /t/ and /d/ of English sound more like the corresponding retroflex consonants of his own language than like the dentals.

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