Voiceless palatal fricative

The voiceless palatal fricative is a type of consonantal sound, used in some spoken languages. The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents this sound is IPA|ç, and the equivalent X-SAMPA symbol is C. The symbol ç is the letter c with a cedilla, as used to spell French words like "façade", although the sound represented by the letter ç in either French or English orthography is not a voiceless palatal fricative but IPA|/s/, the voiceless alveolar fricative.

Palatal fricatives are rare phonemes and only 5% of the world's languages have IPA|/ç/ as a phoneme. [Harvcoltxt|Ladefoged & Maddieson|1996|p=167–68] However, it also tends to occur as an allophone of IPA|/x/ or IPA|/h/ in the vicinity of front vowels, and many English dialects are no exception.

Features

Features of the voiceless palatal fricative:

* Its manner of articulation is fricative, which means it is produced by constricting air flow through a narrow channel at the place of articulation, causing turbulence.
* Its place of articulation is palatal which means it is articulated with the middle or back part of the tongue raised against the hard palate.
* Its phonation type is voiceless, which means it is produced without vibrations of the vocal cords.
* It is an oral consonant, which means air is allowed to escape through the mouth.
* It is a central consonant, which means it is produced by allowing the airstream to flow over the middle of the tongue, rather than the sides.
* The airstream mechanism is pulmonic egressive, which means it is articulated by pushing air out of the lungs and through the vocal tract, rather than from the glottis or the mouth.

Occurrence

ee also

* List of phonetics topics

Notes

References

*Harvard reference
last=Ladefoged
first=Peter
authorlink=Peter Ladefoged
last2=Maddieson
first2=Ian
authorlink2=Ian Maddieson
title=The Sounds of the World's Languages
location=Oxford
publisher=Blackwell
ISBN=0-631-19815-6
*Harvard reference
last = Okada
first = Hideo
year= 1991
title=Phonetic Representation:Japanese
journal=Journal of the International Phonetic Association
volume=21
issue=2
pages=94-97
*Harvard reference
last=Szende
first=Tamás
year=1994
title=Illustrations of the IPA:Hungarian
journal=Journal of the International Phonetic Alphabet
volume=24
issue=2
pages=91-94
*Harvard reference
last=Tryon
first=Darrell T.
title=Comparative Austronesian Dictionary
year=1995
location=Berlin
publisher=Mouton de Gruyter
ISBN=3-110-12729-6