The /t/ Sound

🤗 Join The Club: This is the /t/ sound from the International Phonetic Alphabet. It is a sound from the ‘Consonants Pairs’ group and it is called the ‘Voiceless alveolar stop’. This means that you stop the airflow with your tongue and the ridge behind your teeth. The /t/ sound is made through the mouth and it is Unvoiced which means that you don’t use your vocal chords to make the sound. It is defined by the motion of your tongue and it is a stop sound, which is a sound made by building up air pressure by stopping air flow and then releasing it. In this case you stop the airflow with the tongue against the area behind the top teeth. To produce the sound block the airflow by placing the tip of your tongue behind the top teeth, then release the pressure by pulling the tongue back into your mouth. This video is part of our series on phonetics and pronunciation for learners of English as a foreign language. Phonetics is the science of pronunciation. It can be helpful for people learning English because one of the most difficult things about the language is the spelling and pronunciation. English is not very phonetic and as a result the same letters are often pronounced in many different ways in different words. The IPA helps by providing a way to write words as they are pronounced. The normal alphabet only has 26 characters but there are 44 different sounds that are used to pronounce words. As well as that, most word in English originate from other languages like Greek, Latin and French to name just a few and in many cases the the language of origin influences how the word is pronounced. The IPA provides a symbol (phoneme) for each sound so the correct pronunciation can be written or printed in dictionaries. This video along with the others in our pronunciation series helps language learners to hear the correct pronunciation and also to know how to produce the sound of each phoneme.