Voiced alveolo-palatal fricative

The voiced alveolo-palatal sibilant fricative is a type of consonantal sound, used in some spoken languages. The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents this sound is ʑ ("z", plus the curl also found in its voiceless counterpart ⟨ɕ⟩), and the equivalent X-SAMPA symbol is z\. It is the sibilant equivalent of the voiced palatal fricative, and as such it can be transcribed in IPA with ʝ˖.

Voiced alveolo-palatal fricative
ʑ
IPA Number183
Audio sample
Encoding
Entity (decimal)ʑ
Unicode (hex)U+0291
X-SAMPAz\
Braille⠦ (braille pattern dots-236)⠵ (braille pattern dots-1356)

Features

alveolo-palatal sibilant fricatives [ɕ, ʑ]

Features of the voiced alveolo-palatal fricative:

Occurrence

LanguageWordIPAMeaningNotes
Abkhazажьа[aˈʑa]'hare'See Abkhaz phonology
Adygheжьау[ʑaːw]'shadow'
CatalanEastern[1]ajut[ɐˈʑut̪]'help' (n.)See Catalan phonology
All dialectscaixmir[kä(ɪ̯)ʑˈmiɾ]'Cashmere'
ChineseJiangshan[ʑyœʔ]'ten'
Taiwanese Hokkien今仔日/kin-á-ji̍t[kɪn˧a˥ʑɪt˥]'today'
Czechživot[ʑɪvot]'life'See Czech phonology
EnglishGhana[2]vision[ˈviʑin]'vision'Educated speakers may use [ʒ], which this phoneme corresponds to in other dialects.[2]
Japanese火事/kaji[kaʑi]'fire'Found in free variation with [d͡ʑ] between vowels. See Japanese phonology
Kabardianжьэ[ʑa]'mouth'
Lower Sorbian[3]źasety[ʑäs̪ɛt̪ɨ][stress?]'tenth'
Luxembourgish[4]héijen[ˈhɜ̝ɪ̯ʑən]'high'Allophone of /ʁ/ after phonologically front vowels; some speakers merge it with [ʒ]. Occurs in only a few words.[4] See Luxembourgish phonology
Pa Na[ʑu˧˥]'small'
Polish[5]źrebię'foal'Also denoted by the digraph ⟨zi⟩. See Polish phonology
Portuguese[6][7][8]magia[maˈʑi.ɐ]'magic'Also described as palato-alveolar [ʒ].[9][10] See Portuguese phonology
RomaniKalderash[11]ʒal[ʑal]'he/she/it goes'Realized as [d͡ʒ] in conservative dialects.
RomanianTransylvanian dialects[12]gea[ˈʑanə]'eyelash'Realized as [d͡ʒ] in standard Romanian. See Romanian phonology
RussianConservative Moscow Standard[13]позже[poʑːe]'later'Somewhat obsolete in many words, in which most speakers realize it as hard [ʐː].[13] Present only in a few words, usually written ⟨жж⟩ or ⟨зж⟩. See Russian phonology
Sema[14]aji[à̠ʑì]'blood'Possible allophone of /ʒ/ before /i, e/; can be realized as [d͡ʑ ~ ʒ ~ d͡ʒ] instead.[14]
Serbo-CroatianCroatian[15]puž će[pûːʑ t͡ɕe̞]'the snail will'Allophone of /ʒ/ before /t͡ɕ, d͡ʑ/.[15] See Serbo-Croatian phonology
Some speakers of Montenegrinźenica[ʑȇ̞nit̻͡s̪a̠]'pupil'Phonemically /zj/ or, in some cases, /z/.
SpanishParaguayan[16]carro[ˈkaʑo]'car'Dialectal realization of /r/ and allophone of /ɾ/ after /t/.
Uzbek[17][example needed]
XumiUpper[18][ʑɐ̝˦]'beer, wine'
Yi/yi[ʑi˧]'tobacco'

See also

Notes

References

External links