Voiceless palatal fricative

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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:

Occurrence

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

See also

Notes

References



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Last updated on Wednesday March 05, 2008 at 03:08:16 PST (GMT -0800)
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