All the Different Ways We Pronounce the Letter T

A few episodes ago, I talked about why the T sound sometimes seems to be missing from words like “kitten” or “button.” The answer was that in those words, many speakers use a sound known as a glottal stop. If you listened to that episode, you might remember that a glottal stop is also the sound we make to separate the syllables in the word “uh-oh.” I compared this sound with “aspirated T,” which you get in words like “toy.” After you touch your tongue to the roof of your mouth just behind your front teeth, and then let it down, you get a little puff of air before the vowel sound comes in. 

If you’re a longtime listener, you might also remember an episode from 2016 when I talked about another way of pronouncing T, called the alveolar flap. That’s the pronunciation in most varieties of American English in words such as “atom.” The word “alveolar” refers to the alveolar ridge, which is the bony bump in the gums behind your front teeth. The confusing thing about the alveolar flap is that it’s also one of the ways American English speakers can pronounce the D sound, so that “atom” the thing that a physicist might study, and “Adam” the masculine name, sound the same. It’s also what allows the saying “Work smarter, not harder” to rhyme, even though “smarter” is spelled with a T and “harder” is spelled with a D. 

Going even further back into the archives, another episode from 2016 talked about yet another way of pronouncing the T sound. Here’s what I said then: “‘Let’s look at words that start with just TR, like ‘truck,’ ‘trap,’ and ‘transmogrify.’ If you listen carefully, you can hear that for many speakers, the T is actually pronounced more like a CH sound.”

So that makes four ways of pronouncing the T sound: aspirated T, glottal stop, alveolar flap, and the CH sound. Exactly how many ways of pronouncing T are there, anyway? Today, we’re going to take a T inventory and find out. 

At this point, it’s worth introducing two technical terms so that we can talk about T’s with greater ease. The first one is phoneme [FOE-neem]. When we refer to “the T sound” and don’t care which particular pronunciation we’re talking about, then we’re talking about the phoneme /t/. The second term is...

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