Voiceless dental and alveolar plosives

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Voiceless alveolar and dental plosives (or stops) are a type of consonantal sound used in almost all spoken languages. The alveolar is familiar to English-speakers as the ⟨t⟩ sound in stick. The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents voiceless dental, alveolar, and postalveolar plosives is ⟨t⟩. The voiceless dental plosive can be distinguished with the underbridge diacritic ⟨t̪⟩, and the postalveolar with a retraction line, ⟨t̠⟩. The extIPA also has a double underline diacritic which can be used to explicitly specify an alveolar pronunciation, ⟨t͇⟩. 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 Samoan (which also lacks an [n]), Abau, and Nǁng of South Africa. There are only a few languages which distinguish dental and alveolar stops (or often more precisely laminal and apical alveolar stops), including Kota, Toda, Venda and...

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