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Reference.org
Voiceless dental and alveolar plosives
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<p>The voiceless alveolar, dental and postalveolar plosives (or stops) are types of <a href="/facts/Consonant/81X2SGS6">consonantal</a> sounds used in almost all <a href="/facts/Speech_communication/WEelhfTs">spoken</a> <a href="/facts/Language/IRcTok2q">languages</a>. The symbol in the <a href="/facts/International_Phonetic_Alphabet/2e7jmUaG">International Phonetic Alphabet</a> that represents voiceless <a href="/facts/Dental_consonant/Yraaz9Nm">dental</a>, <a href="/facts/Alveolar_consonant/B6VkW2EX">alveolar</a>, and <a href="/facts/Postalveolar_consonant/YUo5nJly">postalveolar</a> <a href="/facts/Plosive_consonant/okC9pztc">plosives</a> is ⟨t⟩, and the equivalent <a href="/facts/X-SAMPA/LEkkVBgw">X-SAMPA</a> symbol is t. The voiceless dental plosive can be distinguished with the underbridge diacritic, ⟨t̪⟩ and the postalveolar with a retraction line, ⟨t̠⟩, and the <a href="/facts/Extensions_to_the_IPA/LDcj1gPx">extIPA</a> has a double underline diacritic which can be used to explicitly specify an alveolar pronunciation, ⟨t͇⟩. </p><p>The [t] sound is a very common sound cross-linguistically. Most languages have at least a plain [t], and some distinguish more than one variety. Some languages without a [t] are colloquial <a href="/facts/Samoan_language/mpCAULTg">Samoan</a> (which also lacks an [n]), <a href="/facts/Abau/yYHSAeQA">Abau</a>, and <a href="/facts/N%25C7%2581ng_language/w9csCGqP">Nǁng</a> of South Africa. </p><p>There are only a few languages which distinguish dental and alveolar stops, <a href="/facts/Kota_language_(India)/IUa5Y991">Kota</a>, <a href="/facts/Toda_language/LfCw5auo">Toda</a>, <a href="/facts/Venda_language/WVACctUJ">Venda</a> and many <a href="/facts/Australian_Aboriginal_languages/qgJ0HxDm">Australian Aboriginal languages</a> being a few of them; certain varieties of <a href="/facts/Hiberno-English/1RhpyNrx">Hiberno-English</a> also distinguish them (with [t̪] being the local realisation of the Standard English phoneme /θ/, represented by ⟨th⟩). </p>