The voiced palatal plosive 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 J\. The IPA symbol can be considered either a lowercase dotless j with a stroke or a turned lowercase letter f.

Hungarian is one of the few languages with true palatal plosives. More commonly, the symbol ^* is used to represent a voiced postalveolar affricate, for example in the Indic languages. This may be considered appropriate when the place of articulation needs to be specified, but the distinction between stop and affricate is not contrastive, and therefore of secondary importance.

Features

Features of the voiced palatal plosive:

• Its manner of articulation is plosive or stop, which means it is produced by obstructing airflow in the vocal tract. However, there is a tendency for this sound to become a voiced postalveolar affricate.
• Its place of articulation is palatal which means it is articulated with the middle or back part of the tongue raised against the hard palate.
• Its phonation type is voiced, which means the vocal cords are vibrating during the articulation.
• It is an oral consonant, which means air is allowed to escape through the mouth.
• It is a central consonant, which means it is produced by allowing the airstream to flow over the middle of the tongue, rather than the sides.
• The airstream mechanism is pulmonic egressive, which means it is articulated by pushing air out of the lungs and through the vocal tract, rather than from the glottis or the mouth.

In other languages

• gj in Albanian
• ď in Czech and Slovak; it is also pronounced in di dí ^*
• gy in Hungarian (see Hungarian gy)
• ģ in Latvian
• It occurs also in Greek as an allophone of before ^*.

See also

• List of phonetics topics

Consonants

Znělá palatální ploziva | Stimmhafter palataler Plosiv | Consonne occlusive palatale voisée | Consoană oclusivă palatală sonoră | Tonande palatal klusil