Alveolo-palatal consonant

The alveolo-palatal sibilants are often used in varieties of Chinese such as Mandarin, Hakka, and Wu, as well as other East Asian languages such as Japanese and Korean, Tibeto-Burman such as Tibetan and Burmese as well as Tai languages such as Thai, Lao, Shan and Zhuang. Alveolo-palatal sibilants are also a feature of many Slavic languages, such as Polish, Russian, and Serbo-Croatian, and of Northwest Caucasian languages, such as Abkhaz and Ubykh. The alveolo-palatal consonants included in the International Phonetic Alphabet are: Some phoneticians may consider and to be equivalent to and , or and , though others may still maintain a distinction. They are the sibilant homologues of the non-sibilant pre-palatal fricatives and . == Stops, nasals, and liquids ==

Symbols for alveolo-palatal stops (), nasals () and liquids () are sometimes used in sinological circles (a circumflex accent is also sometimes seen), but they are not recognized by the IPA. In standard IPA, they can be transcribed or . An alternative transcription for the voiced alveolo-palatal stop and nasal is , but it is used only when cannot be displayed properly. For example, the Polish nasal represented with the letter ń is a palatalized laminal alveolar nasal and thus often described as alveolo-palatal rather than palatal. The "palatal" consonants of Indigenous Australian languages are also often closer to alveolo-palatal in their articulation. Contrasting with palatovelar consonants In Migueleño Chiquitano, phoneme /ȶ/ contrasts with phoneme /c̠/; in the syllabic coda (or intervowel) position in conservative Irish, laminal alveolo-palatal phoneme /ṉʲ/ (termed fortis slender coronal nasal, orthographic example inn) contrasts with both dorsal palatal phoneme /ɲ/ (termed slender dorsal nasal, orthographic example ing or -nc-) and apical palatalized alveolar phoneme /nʲ/ (termed lenis slender coronal nasal, orthographic example in); while general Irish other than Munster Irish contrasts alveolo-palatal nasal only with palatal nasal. In both cases, the palatal consonants work as the palatalization of velar consonants while alveolo-palatal consonants work as the palatalization of alveolar consonants. In some spoken Chinese varieties, such as the in , contrast the alveolo-palatal nasal with the palato-velar nasal. For example, the following contrasting pairs can be found in Luchuan Ngai. Although a number of spoken Chinese varieties, such as standard Mandarin, also contrast EMC alveolo-palatal nasal with velar nasal of class III (palatalizing medial), most don't contrast them in a way that alveolo-palatal differs from palatal. For example, in Hakka, alveolo-palatal nasal marginally contrasts with velar nasal under close front medials, but there is little sign of palatal contrasts. Thus most frequently, the Sinologist use of ȵ instead of ɲ is not to indicate a contrast, but to emphasize its primary allophone not to be the Turkish [ɲ], or to indicate its coronal origin or that it has evolved with other dorsal consonants which have become alveolopalatals, where ɲ is reserved for postpalatals evolved from dorsal consonants. However, since ȵ has also been unfortunately used by some for Meixian Hakka, the distinction of usage has become vague. ȶ, on the other hand, has retained its accurate usage representing phonemes in certain spoken Chinese in Hengyang and has never been applied on Hakka or on certain Mandarin in or near Shandong. ==Notes==