Voiced dental fricative

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Sound sample (help·info)
IPA – number	131
IPA – text	ð
IPA – image
Entity	ð
X-SAMPA	`D`
Kirshenbaum	`D`

The voiced dental non-sibilant fricative is a type of consonantal sound, used in some spoken languages. The symbols in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represent this sound, "eth", are ð and Ð (lowercase and uppercase, respectively), and the equivalent X-SAMPA symbol is D. The dental fricatives are often called "interdental" because they are often produced with the tongue between the upper and lower teeth, and not just against the back of the teeth, as they are with other dental consonants. It is familiar to English speakers as the 'th' sound in "then."

1 Features
2 In English
3 Other languages
4 See also

[edit] Features

Features of the voiced dental fricative:

Its manner of articulation is fricative, which means it is produced by constricting air flow through a narrow channel at the place of articulation, causing turbulence.
Its place of articulation is dental which means it is articulated with the tongue on either the lower or the upper teeth, or both.
Its phonation type is voiced, which means the vocal cords are vibrating during the articulation.
It is an oral consonant, which means air is allowed to escape through the mouth.
It is a central consonant, which means it is produced by allowing the airstream to flow over the middle of the tongue, rather than the sides.
The airstream mechanism is pulmonic egressive, which means it is articulated by pushing air out of the lungs and through the vocal tract, rather than from the glottis or the mouth.

[edit] In English

The voiced dental fricative occurs in English, and it is the sound denoted by the 'th' digraph in this and the. It is different from the sound represented by 'th' in thing and bath, which is the voiceless dental fricative.

In Old English, the letters þ and ð were used interchangeably for this sound and the voiceless dental fricative, but they have been dropped from modern usage in favour of the 'th' digraph. Although the same digraph is used for the voiced and voiceless forms, these sounds are not interchangeable in spoken English.

In transliterations of terms from foreign languages into English, ð gets respelled as dh, disambiguating it from θ (which gets rendered as th).

[edit] Other languages

Many commonly spoken languages, such as German, French, Japanese, and Chinese, lack this sound. Native speakers of those languages sometimes have difficulty enunciating or distinguishing it, and replace it with a voiced alveolar fricative or a voiced dental plosive.

Confusingly, the dental fricative symbol [ð] is often used when transcribing the "weak" allophone of Spanish /d/, which occurs between vowels. However, this is actually a dental approximant (with slight frication) rather than a fricative, and would be more accurately transcribed with the lowering diacritic, [ð̞].

[edit] Albanian

Albanian uses the digraph 'dh' for this sound.

[edit] Arabic

Arabic uses the letter ذ (dhaal) for this sound.

[edit] Finnish

According to contemporary fennists, the voiced dental fricative was used in old Finnish as the weak counterpart in consonant gradation of the singular voiceless dental plosive /t/. In old literature it was marked with <dh>.

[edit] Greek

Modern Greek uses the letter δ (delta) for this sound.

[edit] Hebrew

In most vocalizations of modern Hebrew this consonant is not used, but Ancient Hebrew used the letter ד (dhaleth without dagesh. With dagesh it becomes דּ, daleth) for this sound. In several vocalizations this distinction has been retained (e.g., Teimani), and it is frequently heard inter-vocalically by Modern Hebrew speakers whose native language is Spanish.