A linguistic or phonetic tendency or principle related to dental sounds or the dental articulation of sounds.
From dental + -ism suffix (from Latin -ismus, meaning a tendency, doctrine, or practice). A technical term from phonetics and historical linguistics.
Dentalism as a phonological principle helps linguists explain why certain sound changes happen in language families—if a language starts dentalising its stops, it can cascade into other changes that reshape the whole sound system.
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