Note that most stops and liquids described as dental are actually denti-alveolar. Its place of articulation is dental, which means it is articulated with either the tip or the blade of the tongue at the upper teeth, termed respectively apical and laminal.It does not have the grooved tongue and directed airflow, or the high frequencies, of a sibilant. Its manner of articulation is fricative, which means it is produced by constricting air flow through a narrow channel at the place of articulation, causing turbulence.Among Semitic languages, they are used in Modern Standard Arabic, albeit not by all speakers of modern Arabic dialects, and in some dialects of Hebrew and Assyrian.įeatures of the voiced dental non-sibilant fricative: Within Turkic languages, Bashkir and Turkmen have both voiced and voiceless dental non-sibilant fricatives among their consonants. However, some "periphery" languages such as Gascon, Welsh, English, Elfdalian, Kven, Northern Sámi, Inari Sámi, Skolt Sámi, Ume Sámi, Mari, Greek, Albanian, Sardinian, Aromanian, some dialects of Basque and most speakers of Spanish have the sound in their consonant inventories, as phonemes or allophones. As for Europe, there seems to be a great arc where the sound (and/or its unvoiced variant) is present.
Native speakers of languages without the sound often have difficulty enunciating or distinguishing it, and they replace it with a voiced alveolar sibilant, a voiced dental stop or voiced alveolar stop, or a voiced labiodental fricative known respectively as th-alveolarization, th-stopping, and th-fronting. Almost all languages of Europe and Asia, such as German, French, Persian, Japanese, and Mandarin, lack the sound. The fricative and its unvoiced counterpart are rare phonemes. It has been proposed that either a turned ⟨ ð⟩ or reversed ⟨ ð⟩ be used as a dedicated symbol for the dental approximant, but despite occasional usage, this has not gained general acceptance. Very rarely used variant transcriptions of the dental approximant include ⟨ ʋ̠⟩ (retracted ), ⟨ ɹ̟⟩ (advanced ) and ⟨ ɹ̪⟩ (dentalised ). The letter ⟨ ð⟩ is sometimes used to represent the dental approximant, a similar sound, which no language is known to contrast with a dental non-sibilant fricative, but the approximant is more clearly written with the lowering diacritic: ⟨ ð̞⟩. Such fricatives are often called " interdental" because they are often produced with the tongue between the upper and lower teeth (as in Received Pronunciation), and not just against the back of the upper teeth, as they are with other dental consonants. Its symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet is eth, or ⟨ð⟩ and was taken from the Old English and Icelandic letter eth, which could stand for either a voiced or unvoiced (inter)dental non-sibilant fricative. It is familiar to English-speakers as the th sound in father. The voiced dental fricative is a consonant sound used in some spoken languages.