A voiced postalveolar or palato-alveolar fricative is a type of consonantal sound used in some spoken languages. It is familiar to many if not most English-speakers as the "s" sound in "fusion".
The International Phonetic Association uses the phrase voiced postalveolar fricative for the sibilant sound , though technically it also describes the voiced postalveolar non-sibilant fricative , for which there are significant perceptual differences.
A 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 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 measure. 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 of a voiced palato-alveolar fricative:
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 ).
A voiced postalveolar non-sibilant fricative is a consonantal sound. As the International Phonetic Alphabet does not have separate symbols for the post-alveolar consonants (the same symbol is used for all coronal places of articulation that are not palatalized), this sound is usually transcribed (retracted constricted ).
However, it does not have the grooved tongue and directed airflow, or the high frequencies, of a sibilant.