Voiced postalveolar fricative

The Voiced Postalveolar fricative /ʒ/ is also known as a palatal, because of some of the influence of the palate in direction of the tongue, but it's not a true palatal sound.

Natlangs

English

English, like many language, has many loanwords from French which have the /ʒ/ sound. In many cases the sound is transformed into /ʤ/ in English, due to English tendency towards that sound. However, there are a few words which do have /ʒ/ outside of French loanwords. Examples include pleasure /plɛʒɘɹ/, leisure /liʒəɹ/ or /lɛʒəɹ/, Asia /eʒə/, vision /vɪʒən/.

Romance Languages

French

The sound /ʒ/ is represented two different ways in French. The first way is the orthographic j. The second ways is to get g before i or e. This is a common sound in the French language, making it one of the signature sounds of it. Many languages can get this sound via French Loanwords.

Spanish

In some dialects of American Spanish, such as Argentinian Spanish, the /j/ sounds (spelt ll or j) is pronounced /ʒ/.

Romanian

In Romanian, the letter j is used to represent the sound /ʒ/. The sound /ʤ/ is represented by g + i or e, and is not the standard /ʒ/.

Portuguese

The symbol j is also used in Portuguese to represent /ʒ/.

Slavic Languages

Russian, Ukrainian, and Belarusian

The Russian Language uses the Cyrillic alphabet, with the symbol Ж, ж for /ʒ/.

Polish

Polish, which uses the Latin Alphabet has Ż, ż for /ʒ/.

Czech, Serbian, Croatian, and Bosnian

The Czech language, which also uses the Latin alphabet has Ž, ž for this sound.

Turkish

In Turkish, the sound is also represented by j.

Hungarian

The sound is represented by zs in Hungarian.

Sources

This page is by Timothy Patrick Snyder. Back to IPA