Voiced postalveolar fricative
| Voiced palato-alveolar sibilant | |||
|---|---|---|---|
| ʒ | |||
| IPA number | 135 | ||
| Encoding | |||
| Entity (decimal) | ʒ |
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| Unicode (hex) | U+0292 | ||
| X-SAMPA | Z |
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| Kirshenbaum | Z |
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| Braille |  |
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| Sound | |||
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| Voiced postalveolar non-sibilant fricative | |
|---|---|
| ɹ̠˔ | |
| IPA number | 151 414 429 |
| Encoding | |
| X-SAMPA | r\_-_r |
The voiced palato-alveolar sibilant fricative or voiced domed postalveolar sibilant 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 ⟨Ʒ ʒ⟩ (/ˈɛʒ/), and the equivalent X-SAMPA symbol is Z. An alternative symbol used in some older and American linguistic literature is ⟨ž⟩, a z with a háček. The sound occurs in many languages and, as in English and French, may have simultaneous lip rounding ([ʒʷ]), although this is rarely indicated in transcription.
Although present in English, the sound is not represented by a specific letter or digraph, but is formed by yod-coalescence of [z] and [j] in words such as measure. It also appears in some loanwords, mainly from French (thus written with ⟨g⟩ and ⟨j⟩). In some transcriptions of alphabets such as Cyrillic, as well as the for English, the sound is represented by the digraph zh.
Some scholars use the symbol /ʒ/ to transcribe the laminal variant of the voiced retroflex sibilant. In such cases, the voiced palato-alveolar sibilant is transcribed /ʒʲ/.
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