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IPA – number	103 + 408
IPA – text	t̪
IPA – image
Entity	t̪
X-SAMPA	t_d
Kirshenbaum	t[
[[:Media:|Sound sample]] (help·[[:Image:|info]])

The voiceless dental plosive is a type of consonantal sound, used in some spoken languages. The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents this sound is t̪, and the equivalent X-SAMPA symbol is t_d. This is the symbol for the voiceless alveolar plosive with the "bridge below" diacritic meaning dental.

Features of the voiceless dental 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 dental which means it is articulated with the tongue on either the lower or the upper teeth, or both.
• 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 center 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.

True dental consonants are relatively uncommon. In the Romance languages, /t/ is often called dental. However, the rearmost contact (which is what gives a consonant its distinctive sound) is actually alveolar, or perhaps denti-alveolar; the fact that the front of the tongue touches the teeth may be more visible, but is unimportant acoustically. The difference between the /t/ sounds of the Romance languages 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 the Romance languages, it is the flat of the tongue just above the tip (such sounds are called laminal).

However, there are languages with true apical (or less commonly laminal) dental t. Many Indian languages, such as Hindi, have a two-way contrast between aspirated and plain [t̪]. In Finnish, the dental plosive /t/ contrasts with the alveolar plosive /d/, although the latter is typically voiced or tapped as a secondary cue; moreover, in native words, the alveolar plosive appears only as a lenition of the dental plosive. Pazeh contrasts a voiced alveolar plosive with a voiceless interdental one.^[1]Many Australian Aboriginal languages contrast alveolar and dental varieties of /t/.

• List of phonetics topics

• Blust, Robert (1999), "Notes on Pazeh Phonology and Morphology", Oceanic Linguistics 38(2): 321-365
• Jones, Daniel & Ward Dennis (1969), The Phonetics of Russian, Cambridge University Press
• Roca, Iggy & Wyn Johnson (1999), A Course in Phonology, Blackwell Publishing
• Watson, Janet (2002), The Phonology and Morphology of Arabic, Oxford University Press