Dental

Dental nasals are rather common in English but are limited to word-final clusters within words and morpheme boundaries between words.

Within words, they occur before the dental fricative [θ] in words like ‘plinth’,  , ‘tenth’,  – which contains two morphemes, ‘ten’ and ‘-th’.

The fricative [ð] occurs initially only in function words, such as ‘this, that, the, those, they’. When nasals occur in this context, there may or may not be friction. So in phrases like ‘in the –’, a range of pronunciations is possible, including  and . In addition to this, dental nasals in English typically have a ‘dark’ secondary resonance, with some degree of valorization. The entry and exit into dental nasals is also slower and less crisp than for alveolar consonants. These details make quite a strong contrast between the definite form ‘in the –’ and the indefinite form ‘in a –’.