The voiceless 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 c.

Hungarian is one of the few languages with true palatal plosives. More commonly, the symbol is used to represent a voiceless 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 voiceless 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 voiceless 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 voiceless, which means it is produced without vibrations of the vocal cords.
• 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

• ky ^*, khy, and gy in the Lhasa dialect of Tibetan
• q in Albanian
• ť in Czech and Slovak; it is also pronounced in ti tí ^*
• ty in Hungarian (see Hungarian ty)
• ķ in Latvian
• It occurs also in Greek as an allophone of before ^*.

See also

• List of phonetics topics

Consonants

Oclusiva palatal sorda | Neznělá palatální ploziva | Stimmloser palataler Plosiv | Consonne occlusive palatale sourde | Consoană oclusivă palatală surdă | Tonlös palatal klusil