The process of making a sound more dental, or the change of a sound to become pronounced with the tongue touching the teeth rather than in another position.
From 'dental' (relating to teeth, from Latin 'dentalis') plus '-ization' (a suffix meaning the process of becoming). The term emerged in phonetics to describe how consonant sounds shift their articulation point toward the teeth.
Linguists discovered that dentalization happens naturally when people speak quickly—your brain takes shortcuts and slides consonants forward to your teeth, which is why 't' sounds change subtly between languages like English and French!
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