ALL About Dental Fricative Replacement (It's Interesting I Swear)
There's a lot of very common words in English that most of the world struggles to grasp, even those learning the language as children.
Even in that last sentence, I used them 4 separate times. These are the wonderful, and very infamous, dental fricatives.
Most people - who are a lot less into this than I am - know them simply as the 'th' sound. This, that, these, those, think, thought, thanks, father, myth, etc. Dental fricatives are everywhere in the English language, but are pretty rare everywhere else! A quick google search will bring you to an article by Researchgate, stating that "they are rare in the world's languages, occurring in 43 (7.6%) out of 566 UPSID languages".
Wikipedia will tell you that only English, Greek, Swahili, and various dialects of Arabic, Spanish, and the northern Berber languages contain the phonemes. Because the 'th' sound (which I will be referring to as the dental fricatives for the remainder of the post) is so incredibly rare, it's more common for English learners to simply replace it than learn it in its entirety. English Global Communication (EGC) writes that the sounds are "notoriously resistant to classroom teaching".
Like many consonants, these dental fricatives come in a pair of voiceless vs voiced consonants. To make explaining things later as simple as possible, I'll have to somewhat explain consonant pairs.
Consonant pairs are made when two phonemes are made using the same area of the mouth, and are created the same way. The alveolar ridge is a part of your mouth, and fricatives are made by "the friction of breath in a narrow opening". So alveolar fricatives are consonants made by a friction of breath in your alveolar ridge.
These pairs include one voiceless (your vocal cords do not vibrate), and voiced (your vocal cords do vibrate) consonant. Examples of these consonant pairs are the aforementioned alveolar fricatives (S being unvoiced and Z being voiced), and the velar plosives (K unvoiced and G voiced).
The voiceless dental fricative is /θ/, pronounced when you say 'thanks' or 'think'.
The voiced dental fricative is /ð/, is pronounced when you say 'that' or 'these'.
Pretty cool, right? Two seperate sounds that we write the exact same way. If you want to learn more about voiced vs unvoiced consonants, or phonemes in general, I recommend this super sick interactive IPA chart. It's been a favorite of mine for a few years now.
Now that some necessary context is out of the way, we get into the meat and potatoes of what this post is about: dental fricative replacement. Teflpedia calls this "Th-substitution", and defines it as "substitution of English dental fricatives, commonly known as "th-sounds,” with other sounds". So, how do different languages make up for a lack of dental fricatives, and how do they choose to do so? There are 4 different ways that a language can replace the absent dental fricative: Th-fronting, Th-stopping, Th-alveolarization, and Th-debuccalization.
Th-fronting refers to replacing the /θ/ and /ð/ sounds with the labiodental fricatives (/f/ and /v/). This replacement is especially interesting because it is overwhelmingly seen in native English dialects. Good examples would be Cockney, Essex, and Yorkshire dialects, as well as African American Vernacular English (AAVE).
/θ/ in the word 'think' becomes 'fink'.
/ð/ in the word 'brother' becomes 'bruvva'.
Th-fronting is interesting because very common words, such as 'that', will never be pronounced as 'vat'. Common dental fricatives retain their original sounds.
Th-stopping is a bit more complex than it's previous counterpart. Here, speakers replace the /θ/ and /ð/ sounds with either alveolar stops (/t/ and /d/) or dental stops [/t/ and /d/]. The blog post won't actually read or format the diacritics under the dental stops, so I'm including a photo to show you what it's actually supposed to look like. I promise they're two different sounds.
There are a wide variety of both languages and English dialects that Th-stop. These include but are not limited to the AAVE, New York City, Inland North, Upper Midwest, and Mid-Atlantic English dialects, Irish English, Indian English, Nigerian English, Germanic languages, and well, you get the point.
/θ/ in the word 'with' becomes 'wit'.
/ð/ in the word 'that' becomes 'dat'.
Th-stopping can also be replaced, in some cases, by T-glottalization. This essentially just means the /t/ sound is pronounced at a glottal stop. Think about the word 'nothing' being pronounced as 'nuh'in'. Airflow is stopped very briefly before resuming in order to make the sound. If I'm not doing too great of a job explaining, this Wikipedia article has some good sound bites you can listen to.
Skipping over Th-alveolarization because it's my favorite and I want to do it last.
In the meantime, Th-debuccalization is a quick and easy point to hit on. It's weird, and only really seen in Glasgow and part of Scotland's central belt.
This is where /θ/ becomes [h].
/θ/ in the word 'three' becomes 'hree'.
In the word 'throw', /θ/ becomes "'hro'.
Don't ask me to make sense of Scots just yet, but it's a damn good article idea. I'll give it that.
I love Th-alveolarization. It's what got me into this whole mess in the first place. Had I not noticed that weird pattern of S vs Z in Japanese loanwords nearly 4 years ago, I probably wouldn't have been nearly as invested in linguistics as I am now.
I know I've already somewhat spoiled it, but Th-alveolarization refers to replacing the dental fricatives /θ/ and /ð/ with the alveolar fricatives (/s/ and /z/). Th-alveolarization happens in some African varieties of English, AAVE, French, German, and Japanese.
/θ/ in the word 'bathroom' would become 'bas-room'.
(Wikipedia notes that this is only seen in rare and/or older varieties of African American Vernacular English, and is implied to be dying out as a linguistic feature relatively soon. Very interesting how language evolves and dies!)
/ð/ in the word 'that' would become 'zat'.
As I stated earlier, I became completely entranced with Th-substitution - or dental fricative replacement, whatever you want to call it - when I first started studying Japanese 4 years ago.
Typically when a language takes a loanword, it adopts the original word into it's own pronunciation. English speakers anglicize things all the time, like cheese and pastry names. Anybody who has studied Japanese for about 10 minutes can tell you that there are no /θ/ and /ð/. That's why when loanwords are taken, they are alveolarized.
Over time, I had started to notice that some 'th' sounds only took 's' sounds like サ (SA), or ソ (SO). However, others were only ever used with 'z' sounds like ザ(ZA), or ゾ (ZO). Why was thank you 'sank you', but father was 'fāza'?
(Unrelated, but Japanese tells speakers if something is is voiced or unvoiced by using diacritics called handakuten. Cool, right?)
This stumped me endlessly, until I started to look into the research between phoneme substitution. Voiced consonants will be substituted for voiced consonants, and vice versa with voiceless consonants. And it's not entirely random either! Languages and dialects will lean more towards one type of substitution depending on which of the substituted sounds are more prevalent in the language.
This one was long, and probably (but hopefully not) a tough read if you weren't well acquainted with this stuff in the slightest before you got here. The last thing I can really say is that if you made it this far, thank you!
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