Dental consonant
:
This article is about a linguistics term. For other uses, please see: Dental.Dentals are
consonants such as
t, d, n, and
l articulated with either the lower teeth, the upper teeth, or both. This would mainly be distinguished from a sound 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").
French, Italian, and Spanish
t, d, n, and
l 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.
Nevertheless, apical dentals occur in some languages. In
Albanian, there are two lateral approximants ("l" sounds): one apical alveolar, and one apical dental. However, the apical dental consonant also has
retracted tongue root—that is, it is
velarized.
Sanskrit,
Hindi and all other
Indic languages have an entire set of
true dental plosives, which occur phonemically as voiced and voiceless, and with or without aspiration. The nasal plosive /n/ 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 /t/ and /d/ of English sound more like the corresponding
retroflex consonants of his own language than the dentals.
Spanish contains a set of dental stops: apico-dental stops occur as allophones of /t/, /d/, and /n/, respectively. It should be noted in the examples that while /t/ and /d/ are commonly realized as apico-dental stops, the Spanish /n/ 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 /l/ does the same.
The dental/denti-alveolar consonants as transcribed by the
International Phonetic Alphabet are:
*
Place of articulation*
List of phonetics topics
