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The dental nasal is a type of consonantal sound, used in some spoken languages. The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents this sound is , and the equivalent X-SAMPA symbol is n_d.
Features Features of the dental nasal: Found in True dental consonants are relatively uncommon. In the Romance languages n is often called dental. However, the rearmost contact (which is what gives a consonant its distinctive sound) is actually alveolar, or perhaps denti-alveolar; the fact that the front of the tongue touches the teeth may be more visible, but is unimportant acoustically. The difference between the Romance languages and English is not so much where the tongue contacts the roof of the mouth, as which part of the tongue makes the contact. In English it is the tip of the tongue (such sounds are termed apical), whereas in the Romance languages it is the flat of the tongue just above the tip (such sounds are called laminal). However, there are languages with true apical (or less commonly laminal) dental n. It is found in Dravidian languages such as Tamil and Malayalam. For example, in the Malayalam pronunciation of "Nārāyanan", the first "n" is dental (the second is retroflex and the third alveolar). See also | |||||||||||||||||||||
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