Voiced alveolo-palatal sibilant

Voiced alveolo-palatal sibilant
ʑ
IPA number	183
Encoding
Entity (decimal)	ʑ
Unicode (hex)	U+0291
X-SAMPA	z\
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Sound
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The voiced alveolo-palatal sibilant fricative is a type of consonantal sound, used in some spoken languages. The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) that represents this sound is ⟨ʑ⟩, and the equivalent X-SAMPA symbol is z\.

Features

alveolo-palatal sibilant fricatives [ɕ, ʑ]

Features of the voiced alveolo-palatal fricative:

• Its manner of articulation is sibilant fricative, which means it is generally produced by channeling air flow along a groove in the back of the tongue up to the place of articulation, at which point it is focused against the sharp edge of the nearly clenched teeth, causing high-frequency turbulence.

• Its place of articulation is alveolo-palatal. This means that:
  • Its place of articulation is postalveolar, meaning that the tongue contacts the roof of the mouth in the area behind the alveolar ridge (the gum line).
  • Its tongue shape is laminal, meaning that it is the tongue blade that contacts the roof of the mouth.
  • It is heavily palatalized, meaning that the middle of the tongue is bowed and raised towards the hard palate.

• Its phonation is voiced, which means the vocal cords vibrate during the articulation.

• It is an oral consonant, which means air is allowed to escape through the mouth only.

• It is a central consonant, which means it is produced by directing the airstream along the center of the tongue, rather than to the sides.

• The airstream mechanism is pulmonic, which means it is articulated by pushing air solely with the lungs and diaphragm, as in most sounds.

Occurrence

Language		Word	IPA	Meaning	Notes
Abkhaz		ажьа	[aˈʑa]	'hare'	See Abkhaz phonology
Adyghe		жьау	[ʑaːw]	'shadow'
Catalan	Eastern and Majorcan[1]	ajut	[əˈʑut]	'help' (n.)	See Catalan phonology
Chinese	Jiangshan dialect of Wu	十	[ʑyœʔ]	'ten'
	Southern Min	今仔日/kin-á-ji̍t	[kɪn˧a˥ʑɪt˥]	'today'
Japanese		火事/kaji	[kaʑi]	'fire'	Found in free variation with [d͡ʑ] between vowels. See Japanese phonology
Kabardian		жьэ	[ʑa]	'mouth'
Luxembourgish[2]		héijen	[ˈhəi̯ʑɵ̞n]	'high'	Allophone of /ʁ/ after phonologically front vowels; some speakers merge it with [ʒ]. Occurs only in a few words.[2] See Luxembourgish phonology
Pashto	Wazirwola dialect	ميږ‎	[miʑ]	'we'
Polish[3]		źrebię	[ˈʑrɛbjɛw̃]	'foal'	Also denoted by the digraph ⟨zi⟩. See Polish phonology
Portuguese[4]	Brazilian	magia	[maˈʑi.ɐ]	'magic', 'sorcery'	Allophonic variation of /ʒ/. Contrasts with other sibilants only in onset. Argued both to be laminal [ʒ],[5] and generally produced "in the middle of the hard palate",[4] same of fellow alveolo-palatal [l̠ʲ] and [n̠ʲ],[6] and further palatalized than Italian post-alveolars.[7] Found in coda mainly before fricative, coronal and palatalized consonants in Brazil.[8][9] See Portuguese phonology
	European (?)	rasgos dóem	[ˈʀaʑguʑ ˈdɔẽj]	'[these] rips hurt'
	Carioca
	Many Brazilian dialects	eles, desde sempre	[ˈeɫiʑ ˈdeʑdʑi̥ ˈsẽpɾi̥]	'they, since ever'
	Some speakers		[ˈelɪz ˈdeɪ̯ʑːɪ ˈsẽpɾɪ]
Romanian	Transylvanian dialects[10]	geană	[ʑanə]	'eyelash'	Realized as [d͡ʒ] in standard Romanian. See Romanian phonology
Russian	Conservative Moscow Standard[11]	езжу	[ˈjeʑːʊ]	'I drive'	Somewhat obsolete; most speakers realize it as hard [ʐː].[11] Present only in a few words, usually written ⟨жж⟩ or ⟨зж⟩. See Russian phonology
Sema[12][13]		aji	[à̠ʑì]	'blood'	Possible allophone of /ʒ/ before /i, e/; can be realized as [d͡ʑ ~ ʒ ~ d͡ʒ] instead.[13]
Serbo-Croatian	Croatian[14]	пуж ħе / puž će	[pûːʑ t͡ɕe̞]	'the snail will'	Allophone of /ʒ/ before /t͡ɕ, d͡ʑ/.[14] See Serbo-Croatian phonology
Sorbian	Lower[15]	źasety	[ʑäs̪ɛt̪ɨ]	'tenth'
Uzbek[16]
Xumi	Upper[17]	[^Hʑɜ]		'beer, wine'
Yi		ꑳ/yi	[ʑi˧]	'tobacco'

See also

• Index of phonetics articles

References

1. Recasens & Espinosa (2007:145, 167)
2. Gilles & Trouvain (2013), pp. 67–68.
3. Jassem (2003:103)
4. seqüências de (sibilante + africada alveopalatal) no português falado em Belo Horizonte Page 18 (Portuguese)
5. Análise acústica de sequências de fricativas seguidas de [i produzidas por japoneses aprendizes de português brasileiro] (Portuguese)
6. Considerações sobre o status das palato-alveolares em português (Portuguese)
7. Dialects of Brazil: the palatalization of the phonemes /t/ and /d/ Page 27 (Portuguese)
8. Pará Federal University – The pronunciation of /s/ and its variations across Bragança municipality's Portuguese (Portuguese)
9. Rio de Janeiro Federal University – The variation of post-vocallic /S/ in the speech of Petrópolis, Itaperuna and Paraty (Portuguese)
10. Pop (1938), p. 30.
11. Yanushevskaya & Bunčić (2015:224)
12. Teo (2012:368)
13. Teo (2014:23)
14. Landau et al. (1999:68)
15. Zygis (2003:180–181)
16. Sjoberg (1963:11)
17. Chirkova, Chen & Kocjančič Antolík (2013:383)

Bibliography

• Chirkova, Katia; Chen, Yiya; Kocjančič Antolík, Tanja (2013), "Xumi, Part 2: Upper Xumi, the Variety of the Upper Reaches of the Shuiluo River" (PDF), Journal of the International Phonetic Association 43 (3): 381–396, doi:10.1017/S0025100313000169
• Gilles, Peter; Trouvain, Jürgen (2013), "Luxembourgish" (PDF), Journal of the International Phonetic Association 43 (1): 67–74, doi:10.1017/S0025100312000278
• Jassem, Wiktor (2003), "Polish", Journal of the International Phonetic Association 33 (1): 103–107, doi:10.1017/S0025100303001191
• Landau, Ernestina; Lončarić, Mijo; Horga, Damir; Škarić, Ivo (1999), "Croatian", Handbook of the International Phonetic Association: A guide to the use of the International Phonetic Alphabet, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 66–69, ISBN 0-521-65236-7
• Pop, Sever (1938), Micul Atlas Linguistic Român, Muzeul Limbii Române Cluj
• Recasens, Daniel; Espinosa, Aina (2007), "An electropalatographic and acoustic study of affricates and fricatives in two Catalan dialects" (PDF), Journal of the International Phonetic Association 37 (2): 143–172, doi:10.1017/S0025100306002829
• Sjoberg, Andrée F. (1963), Uzbek Structural Grammar
• Teo, Amos B. (2012), "Sumi (Sema)", Journal of the International Phonetic Association 42 (03): 365–373, doi:10.1017/S0025100312000254
• Teo, Amos B. (2014), A phonological and phonetic description of Sumi, a Tibeto-Burman language of Nagaland (PDF), Canberra: Asia-Pacific Linguistics, ISBN 978-1-922185-10-5
• Yanushevskaya, Irena; Bunčić, Daniel (2015), "Russian", Journal of the International Phonetic Association 45 (2): 221–228, doi:10.1017/S0025100314000395
• Zygis, Marzena (2003), "Phonetic and Phonological Aspects of Slavic Sibilant Fricatives" (PDF), ZAS Papers in Linguistics 3: 175–213