Voiced Palato-alveolar Sibilant

Voiced Palato-alveolar Sibilant

The voiced palato-alveolar fricative or voiced domed postalveolar fricative is a type of consonantal sound, used in some spoken languages. The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents this sound is ⟨ʒ⟩, and the equivalent X-SAMPA symbol is Z. An alternative symbol used in some older and American linguistic literature is ⟨ž⟩, a z with a háček. The sound occurs in many languages and, as in English and French, may have simultaneous lip rounding, although this is rarely indicated in transcription.

Although present in English, apart from loanwords, mainly from French (thus written with and ), the sound is not represented by a specific letter or digraph, but is formed by yod-coalescence of and in words such as measure. In some transcriptions of alphabets such as Cyrillic, as well as the Wikipedia pronunciation respelling for English, the sound is represented by the digraph zh.