Voiceless alveolar and dental plosives (or stops) are a type of consonantal sound used in almost all spoken languages. The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents voiceless dental, alveolar, and postalveolar plosives is ⟨t⟩. The voiceless dental plosive can be distinguished with the underbridge diacritic, ⟨t̪⟩ and the postalveolar with a retraction line, ⟨t̠⟩, and the extIPA has a double underline diacritic which can be used to explicitly specify an alveolar pronunciation, ⟨t͇⟩.

The [t] sound is a very common sound cross-linguistically. Most languages have at least a plain [t], and some distinguish more than one variety. Some languages without a [t] are colloquial Samoan (which also lacks an [n]), Abau, and Nǁng of South Africa.^{[citation needed]}

There are only a few languages which distinguish dental and alveolar stops, Kota, Toda, Venda and many Australian Aboriginal languages being a few of them; certain varieties of Hiberno-English also distinguish them (with [t̪] being the local realisation of the Standard English phoneme /θ/, represented by ⟨th⟩).

Here are the features of voiceless alveolar stops: