Dental stop
consonantal sound
In phonetics and phonology, a dental stop is a type of consonantal sound, made with the tongue in contact with the upper teeth (hence dental), held tightly enough to block the passage of air (hence a stop consonant).
Dental and alveolar stops are often conflated. Acoustically, the two types of sounds are similar, and it is rare for a language to have both types, though there are languages which have both and in which they are phonemic, such as in the Bengali spoken in Bangladesh (as opposed to that spoken in West Bengal). Speakers of mainstream Irish English generally use dental stops in place of the dental fricatives [θ] and [ð]. The International Phonetic Alphabet does not provide separate symbols for dental stops, but simply uses the diacritic U+032A ◌̪ COMBINING BRIDGE BELOW attached to the corresponding alveolar symbol. As a result, it is common for researchers working in the majority of languages with only one type or the other to simply use the alveolar symbols indifferently for both types, unless they specifically want to call attention to the distinction.
The most common sounds are the stops [t̪] and [d̪].
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This entry incorporates text from “Dental stop” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.