Voiceless alveolar plosive explained

The voiceless alveolar plosive is a type of consonantal sound used in many spoken languages. The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents voiceless dental, alveolar, and postalveolar plosives is , and the equivalent X-SAMPA symbol is t. The dental version can be distinguished with the underbridge diacritic (; see voiceless dental plosive), and the Extensions to the IPA have a double underline diacritic which can be used to explicitly specify an alveolar pronunciation .

The [t] sound is a very common sound cross-linguistically; the most common consonant phonemes of the world's languages are [t], [k] and [p]. Most languages have at least a plain [t], and some distinguish more than one variety. The only languages known without a [t] are Hawaiian (outside of Ni‘ihau; Hawaiian uses a glottal stop as a 'replacement'), and colloquial Samoan, which also lacks an [n].

Features

Features of the voiceless alveolar plosive:

• Its manner of articulation is plosive or stop, which means it is produced by obstructing airflow in the vocal tract.
• Its place of articulation is alveolar, which means it is articulated with either the tip or the blade of the tongue against the alveolar ridge, termed respectively apical and laminal.
• Its phonation type is voiceless, which means it is produced without vibrations of the vocal cords.
• It is an oral consonant, which means air is allowed to escape through the mouth.
• It is a central consonant, which means it is produced by allowing the airstream to flow over the middle of the tongue, rather than the sides.
• The airstream mechanism is pulmonic egressive, which means it is articulated by pushing air out of the lungs and through the vocal tract, rather than from the glottis or the mouth.

Varieties of the voiceless alveolar plosive

IPA	Description
	tenuis t
	aspirated t
	palatalized t
	labialized t
	prenasalized t
	pharyngealized t
	unreleased t
	ejective t

Occurrence

Language		Word	IPA	Meaning	Notes
Chinese	Mandarin	Chinese: [[Chinese Characters|大]]/Chinese: [[Hanyu Pinyin|'''''d'''à'']]		'big'	Contrasts with aspirated form. See Standard Mandarin
Czech		Czech: [[Czech orthography|'''''t'''o'''t'''o'']]		'this'	See Czech phonology
Dutch		Dutch; Flemish: [[Dutch orthography|'''''t'''aal'']]		'language'	See Dutch phonology
English		English: [[English orthography|'''''t'''ick'']]		'tick'	See English phonology
Finnish		Finnish: [[Finnish alphabet|''par'''t'''a'']]		'beard'	Allophone of the voiceless dental plosive. See Finnish phonology
French		French: [[French orthography|'''''t'''ordu'']]		'crooked'	See French phonology
German		German: [[German orthography|'''''T'''ochter'']]		'daughter'	See German phonology
Greek		Greek, Modern (1453-): [[Greek alphabet|'''τ'''ρία]]		'three'	See Modern Greek phonology
Hungarian		Hungarian: [[Hungarian orthography|'''''t'''u'''t'''aj'']]		'raft'	See Hungarian phonology
Japanese		Japanese: [[kanji|特別]]/Japanese: [[Romanization of Japanese|'''''t'''okubetsu'']]		'special'	See Japanese phonology
Korean		Korean: [[Korean alphabet|턱/'''''t'''eok'']]		'jaw'	See Korean phonology
Maltese		Norwegian: [[Maltese alphabet|'''t'''assew'' ]]		'true, correct'
Norwegian		Norwegian: [[Norwegian alphabet|'''''t'''ann'']]		'tooth'	See Norwegian phonology
Slovak		Slovak: [[Slovak alphabet|'''''t'''o'']]		'that'	See Slovak phonology
Swedish		Swedish: [[Swedish alphabet|'''''t'''åg'']]		'train'	See Swedish phonology
Thai		Thai: [[Thai script|'''ต'''า]]/ta		'eye'
Vietnamese		Vietnamese: [[Vietnamese alphabet|'''t'''i]]		'flaw, defect'	See Vietnamese phonology

See also

• List of phonetics topics

Notes and References