A
voiced palato-alveolar fricative or
voiced domed postalveolar fricative is a type of
consonantal sound, used in some
spoken languages. of a voiced palato-alveolar fricative
Transcription The symbol in the
International Phonetic Alphabet that represents this sound is the lower case form of the letter
Ezh (). An alternative symbol used in some older and American linguistic literature is , a
z with a
caron. In some
transcriptions of alphabets such as the
Cyrillic, the sound is represented by the digraph . Although present in English, the sound is not represented by a specific letter or digraph, but is formed by
yod-coalescence of and in words such as mea
sure. It also appears in some loanwords, mainly from French (thus written with and ). occurs as a borrowed phoneme in a number of languages under the influence of French, Persian or Slavic languages, as in the Germanic languages (Dutch, English, German and
Luxembourgish), the Romance languages (Italian and Romanian), the Turkic languages (Azerbaijani,
Bashkir, Turkish, and
Uyghur), and the Uralic languages
(Estonian and Hungarian),
Breton and
Maltese. The phoneme has the lowest consonant frequency in both English and Persian. In
English and
French, may have simultaneous
lip rounding (), although this is rarely indicated in transcription.
Features Features of a voiced palato-alveolar fricative:
Occurrence The sound in
Russian denoted by is commonly transcribed as a palato-alveolar fricative but is actually a
laminal retroflex fricative. In English, the phoneme is often found as a
hyperforeign substitute for in certain borrowings,
Beijing (Mandarin Chinese , a voiceless )
, raj, Taj Mahal, and sometimes even
parmesan (French ; Italian ). ==Voiced postalveolar non-sibilant fricative==