Dental consonants are speech sounds produced by placing the tip or blade of the tongue against the upper front teeth. They are one subgroup of coronal consonants; a related term is coronal consonant, which covers sounds made with the tongue’s front portion. In phonetic transcription dental fricatives are commonly represented by symbols such as θ and ð, while dental stops are often indicated with a diacritic, e.g. t̪ and d̪.
Characteristics and articulation
Articulation involves contact between the tongue and the upper teeth (dental) or between the tongue and both upper and lower teeth (interdental). The relevant tongue part may be the very tip (apical) or the blade (laminal). Dentals contrast with alveolar sounds (tongue against the alveolar ridge) and retroflex or postalveolar sounds (tongue curled or placed further back).
Examples and orthography
- English: the voiceless and voiced dental fricatives in words like thing [θ] and this [ð], often spelled th.
- Spanish and Italian: stops written t and d are typically dental or dentalized rather than alveolar.
- South Asian languages: many contrast dental versus retroflex stops as a phonemic distinction (e.g. dental t̪ vs retroflex ʈ).
Different languages realize dental sounds with slight variations: some produce interdental fricatives (between the teeth), others produce true denti-alveolar articulations (contact spanning teeth and alveolar ridge).
Typology, development, and significance
Dental consonants occur widely around the world and participate in common historical sound changes (for example, shifts between dental and alveolar places of articulation). They are important for phonological contrasts in many language families and can affect neighboring vowels and consonants through coarticulation. Because dental and interdental sounds are relatively rare in some areas, they often serve as salient dialectal or language-specific markers.