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In linguistics, a 'dental consonant' or 'dental' is a consonant that is articulated with the tongue against the upper teeth, such as , , , and in some languages. Dentals are primarily distinguished from sounds in which contact is made with the tongue and the gum ridge, as in English (''see'' Alveolar consonant), due to the acoustic similarity of the sounds and the fact that in the Roman alphabet they are generally written using the same symbols (''t'', ''d'', ''n'', and so on).

Contents

Dentals cross-linguistically

Dental consonants in the world's languages

Dental-alveolar confusion in the Romance languages

See also

Dentals cross-linguistically

''Pure'' or ''apical'' dentals occur in many languages. In Albanian, there are two lateral approximants (''l'' sounds): one apical alveolar, and one apical dental. However, the apical dental consonant is articulated with retracted tongue root — that is, it is velarized.
Sanskrit, Hindi and all other Indic languages have an entire set of dental plosives which occur phonemically as voiced and voiceless, and with or without aspiration. The nasal plosive also exists in these languages, but is quite alveolar and apical in articulation. In these languages these coronal stops are very similar to those found in Spanish (apico-dental), but different than those in French (lamino-alveolar), and quite distinct from those found in English (apico-alveolar). To the Indian speaker, the alveolar and of English sound more like the corresponding retroflex consonants of his own language than the dentals.
Spanish and Italian contain a set of dental stops: apico-dental stops occur as allophones of , , and , respectively. It should be noted in the examples that while and are commonly realized as apico-dental stops, the Spanish is generally realized as an apico-alveolar stop (as in English), but assimilates to the apico-dental place of articulation when proceeding such a consonant. The Spanish alveolar lateral does the same.

Dental consonants in the world's languages

The dental/denti-alveolar consonants as transcribed by the International Phonetic Alphabet are:

IPA	Description	Example
		Language	Orthography	IPA	Meaning
	dental nasal	Spanish	o'n'da	''
	voiceless dental plosive	Spanish	''	[''
	voiced dental plosive	Spanish	'd'on'd'e	''''
	voiceless dental sibilant fricative	Polish	ko's'a	''
	voiced dental sibilant fricative	Polish	ko'z'a	''
	voiceless dental nonsibilant fricative (also often called "interdental")	English	'th'ing	''
	voiced dental nonsibilant fricative (also often called "interdental")	English	'th'is	''
	dental approximant	Spanish	co'd'o	''
	dental lateral approximant	Albanian	ha'll'a	''
	dental flap
	dental trill	Marshallese	Eba'd'on	''	Ebadon
	dental ejective
	voiced dental implosive
	dental click release	Xhosa	ukú'c'ola	''	to

Dental-alveolar confusion in the Romance languages

French, Italian, and Spanish ''t'' and ''d'' are often called dental for the sake of simplicity. However, in French these sounds are actually alveolar, or perhaps denti-alveolar; the difference between these sounds in French and English is not so much where the tongue contacts the roof of the mouth as which part of the tongue makes the contact. In English it is the tip of the tongue (such sounds are termed apical), whereas in French it is the blade, or area just behind the tip of the tongue (such sounds are called laminal).
The confusion with 'dental' articulation comes from looking at the tongue from outside the mouth: With laminal (denti-)alveolar consonants, the tip of the tongue can be seen touching the teeth. However, it is the rear-most point of contact that is most relevant, for this is what defines the maximum acoustic space of resonance and will give a consonant its characteristic sound. In the case of French, the rear-most contact is alveolar or sometimes slightly pre-alveolar.
This laminal/apical difference is important. If an English speaker trying to speak French simply moves the tongue forward to make the contact dental, while maintaining an apical articulation, any surrounding front rounded vowels may be difficult to pronounce. If, however, the speaker tucks the tip of the tongue out of the way (such as behind the lower teeth), and makes contact on the alveolar ridge (the same place as in English, but here with a different part of the tongue), the consonants will sound have the proper "French" sound, and the vowels will be much easier to pronounce since the tongue body is already raised towards the palate. Thus a sufficient phonetic description of a language must specify both the active ("moving") and passive ("non-moving") articulators in the production of the coronal consonants.

See also

★ Place of articulation

★ List of phonetics topics