Voiceless alveolar and dental taps (or flaps) are a type of consonantal sound used in some spoken languages, though only reported to exist as an allophone. The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents this sound is , a combination of the letter for the voiced alveolar tap/flap and a diacritic indicating voicelessness.

A similar sound, a voiceless alveolar tapped fricative reported for some languages including English, is actually a very brief voiceless alveolar non-sibilant fricative.

Features

Features of a voiceless alveolar tap or flap:

Its manner of articulation is tap or flap, which means it is produced with a single contraction of the muscles so that the tongue makes very brief contact. Its place of articulation is dental or alveolar, which means it is articulated behind upper front teeth or at the alveolar ridge. It is most often apical, which means that it is pronounced with the tip of the tongue.

Occurrence

Dental Language Word IPA Meaning Notes English throw 'throw' Allophone of after .

Alveolar Language Word IPA Meaning Notes Bengali 'again' Possible allophone of in the syllable coda. See Bengali phonology Catalan Many Balearic speakers 'sea' Apical. Possible allophone of in the syllable coda. See Catalan phonology South-western Catalonia Valencian English Irish three 'three' Conservative accents. Corresponds to [ ~ ~ ] in other accents. Scottish Most speakers. Others use [ ~ ]. Older Received Pronunciation Allophone of . Scouse South African Broad accents. Can be [ ~ ] instead. Greek Cypriot 'brother' Allophone of before voiceless consonants. May be a voiceless alveolar trill instead Icelandic 'raven' Realization of for some speakers. Also illustrates . See Icelandic phonology Portuguese European 'to bake' Apparent allophone of ; distribution unclear, but common in the coda in 's corpus. See Portuguese phonology Turkish 'one' /ɾ/ is frequently devoiced word-finally and before a voiceless consonant. See Turkish phonology Wu Chinese Xuanzhou Wu (Nanling variety) 'brother' // corresponds to // in other varieties (cf. Shanghainese ). Xuanzhou varieties tend to have // as their primary realisation of this phoneme (cf. //)

See also Index of phonetics articles

Notes

References

External links