True dental consonants are relatively uncommon. In the Romance languages, /t/ is often called dental. However, the rearmost contact (which is what gives a consonant its distinctive sound) is actually alveolar, or perhaps denti-alveolar; the fact that the front of the tongue touches the teeth may be more visible, but is unimportant acoustically.[citation needed] The difference between the /t/ sounds of the Romance languages 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 a number of Romance languages, it is the flat of the tongue just above the tip (such sounds are called laminal).
However, there are languages with true apical (or less commonly laminal) dental t. Many Indian languages, such as Hindi, have a two-way contrast between aspirated and plain [t̪]. In Finnish, the dental plosive /t/ contrasts with the alveolar plosive /d/, although the latter is typically voiced or tapped as a secondary cue; moreover, in native words, the alveolar plosive appears only as a lenition of the dental plosive. Pazeh contrasts a voiced alveolar plosive with a voiceless interdental one.[1]Many Australian Aboriginal languages contrast alveolar and dental varieties of /t/.
This table contains phonetic information in IPA, which may not display correctly in some browsers. [Help]
Where symbols appear in pairs, the one to the right represents a voiced consonant. Shaded areas denote pulmonic articulations judged to be impossible.
