The voiceless alveolar stop is a type of consonantal sound used in many spoken languages. The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents voiceless dental, alveolar, and postalveolar stops is ⟨t⟩, and the equivalent X-SAMPA symbol is t. The dental stop can be distinguished with the underbridge diacritic, ⟨t̪⟩, the postalveolar with a retraction line, ⟨t̠⟩, and the Extensions to the IPA have a double underline diacritic which can be used to explicitly specify an alveolar pronunciation, ⟨t͇⟩.
The sound is a very common sound cross-linguistically; the most common consonant phonemes of the world's languages are, and . Most languages have at least a plain, and some distinguish more than one variety. Some languages without a are Hawaiian (outside of Ni‘ihau; Hawaiian uses a voiceless velar stop when adopting loanwords with ), colloquial Samoan (which also lacks an ), and Nǁng of South Africa.
Read more about Voiceless Alveolar Stop: Features, Varieties, Occurrence
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