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, and the equivalent X-SAMPA symbol is C. It is the non-sibilant equivalent of the voiceless alveolo-palatal fricative.
The symbol ç is the letter c with a cedilla, as used to spell French and Portuguese words such as façade and ação. However, the sound represented by the letter ç in French and Portuguese orthography is not a voiceless palatal fricative but, the voiceless alveolar fricative.
Palatal fricatives are relatively rare phonemes, and only 5% of the world's languages have as a phoneme. The sound occurs, however, as an allophone of in German, or, in other languages, of in the vicinity of front vowels.
There is also the voiceless post-palatal fricative in some languages, which is articulated slightly more back compared with the place of articulation of the prototypical voiceless palatal fricative, though not as back as the prototypical voiceless velar fricative. The International Phonetic Alphabet does not have a separate symbol for that sound, though it can be transcribed as, or . The equivalent X-SAMPA symbols are C_- and x_+, respectively.
Especially in broad transcription, the voiceless post-palatal fricative may be transcribed as a palatalized voiceless velar fricative.

Features

Features of the voiceless palatal fricative:
The otherwise identical post-palatal variant is articulated slightly behind the hard palate, making it sound slightly closer to the velar.

Occurrence

Palatal

Post-palatal