Dental consonant

Dentals are consonants articulated with either the lower or the upper teeth, or both. In French, Italian, and Spanish t, d, n, and l are all dental, whereas they are alveolar in English.

The dental consonants identified by the International Phonetic Alphabet are:

IPA	Description	Example
		Language	Orthography	IPA	Meaning
	dental nasal	Spanish	onda	[ɔn̪d̪a]	wave
	voiceless dental plosive	Spanish	toro	[t̪oɾo]	bull
	voiced dental plosive	Spanish	donde	[d̪ɔn̪d̪e]	where
	voiceless dental fricative	English	thing	[θiŋ]	thing
	voiced dental fricative	English	this	[ðɪs]	this
	voiced dental approximant	Spanish	codo	[koð̞o]	elbow
	dental lateral approximant	Kaititj	l̪inp	[l̪inp]	armpit
	dental flap
	dental trill	Marshallese	Ebadon	[e.bɑ.r̪on̪]	Ebadon
	dental ejective
	voiced dental implosive
	dental click	Xhosa	ukúkǀola	[ukukǀola]	to grind fine

See also

• Place of articulation
• List of phonetics topics