A voiceless palatal lateral fricative is a type of consonantal sound, used in a few spoken languages. This sound is somewhat rare; Dahalo has both a palatal lateral fricative and an affricate; Hadza has a series of palatal lateral affricates. In Bura, it is the realization of palatalized and contrasts with .
The extensions to the IPA transcribes this sound with the letter ( with a belt, analogous to for the voiceless alveolar lateral fricative), which was added to Unicode in 2021. Some scholars also posit a voiceless palatal lateral approximant distinct from the fricative. The approximant may be represented in the IPA as .
If distinction is necessary, a voiceless alveolo-palatal lateral fricative may be transcribed as (retracted and palatalized ) or as advanced ; these are essentially equivalent. The approximant also occurs and can be represented as or .
Features of the voiceless palatal lateral fricative:
Archi, a Northeast Caucasian language of Dagestan, has four voiceless palatal lateral fricatives: plain , labialized , fortis , and labialized fortis . Although clearly fricatives, these are further back than palatals in most languages, but further forward than velars in most languages, and might better be called post-palatal or pre-velar. Archi also has a voiced fricative, as well as a voiceless and several ejective lateral velar affricates, but no alveolar lateral fricatives or affricates.