Intervocalic consonant

In phonetics and phonology, an intervocalic consonant is a consonant that occurs between two vowels. Intervocalic consonants are often associated with lenition, a phonetic process that causes consonants to weaken and eventually disappear entirely. An example of such a change in English is intervocalic alveolar flapping, a process (especially in North American English and Australian English) that, impressionistically speaking, turns t into d, causing (e.g.) metal and batter to sound like medal and badder, respectively. (More precisely, both /t/ and /d/ are pronounced with the alveolar tap [ɾ].) In North American English the weakening is variable across word boundaries, so that the /t/ of "see you tomorrow" may be pronounced with either tap [ɾ] or [tʰ]. Some languages have intervocalic weakening processes fully active word-internally and in connected discourse: e.g. Spanish /d/ regularly pronounced [ð] in both todo [ˈtoðo] "all" and la duna [laˈðuna] "the dune" (but [ˈduna] if the word is pronounced alone).