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 [[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 /s/, the voiceless alveolar fricative.

Palatal fricatives are rare phonemes and only 5% of the world's languages have /ç/ as a phoneme. However, it also tends to occur as an allophone of or 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

Language		Word	IPA	Meaning	Notes
Azerbaijani	some dialects	çörək		'bread'
English		hue		'hue'	Allophone of /h/. See English phonology and Yod-coalescence
Finnish		vihko		'notebook'	Allophone of /h/. See Finnish phonology
German		dicht		'dense'	See German phonology
Greek		χιόνι		'snow'	See Modern Greek phonology
Haida		xíl	[çɪ́l]	'leaf'
Hungarian		méh	[meːç]	'bee'	Allophone of /h/. See Hungarian phonology
Icelandic		hérna		'here'	See Icelandic phonology
Irish		a Sheáin		'John (Voc.)'	See Irish phonology
Korean		힘/him		'strength'	See Korean phonology
Japanese		貧血/hinketsu		'anemia'	Allophone of /h/ before /i/. See Japanese phonology
Kabyle		ḵil	[çil]	'to measure'
Norwegian		kyss		'kiss'	See Norwegian phonology
Polish		hiacynt	[çat͡sɨnt]	'hyacinth'	See Polish phonology
Scottish Gaelic		eich		'horses'
Xârâcùù		?		'stone'

See also

• List of phonetics topics

Notes

References