Sibilants
The alveolo-palatal sibilants are often used in the Chinese languages such as Mandarin, Hakka, and Wu, as well as other languages in the East Asian sprachbund, such as Japanese and Korean. Alveolo-palatal sibilants are also a feature of many Slavic languages, such as Polish, Russian and Serbo-Croatian, and of Northwest Caucasian languages, such as Abkhaz and Ubykh. The alveolo-palatal consonants included in the International Phonetic Alphabet are:
| IPA | Description | Example | |||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Language | Orthography | IPA | Meaning | ||
| ɕ | Voiceless alveolo-palatal fricative | Mandarin | 小 (xiǎo) | small | |
| ʑ | Voiced alveolo-palatal fricative | Polish | zioło | herb | |
| t͡ɕ | Voiceless alveolo-palatal affricate | Serbo-Croatian | kuća / кућа | house | |
| d͡ʑ | Voiced alveolo-palatal affricate | Japanese | 地震 (jishin) | earthquake | |
The letters ⟨ɕ⟩ and ⟨ʑ⟩ are essentially equivalent to ⟨ ʃʲ⟩ and ⟨ʒʲ⟩. They are the sibilant homologues of the pre-palatal fricatives and .
Read more about this topic: Alveolo-palatal Consonant