Palato-alveolar consonant

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In phonetics, palato-alveolar or palatoalveolar consonants are postalveolar consonants, nearly always sibilants, that are weakly palatalized with a domed (bunched-up) tongue. They are common sounds cross-linguistically and occur in English words such as ship and chip.

The fricatives are transcribed ⟨ʃ⟩ (voiceless) and ⟨ʒ⟩ (voiced) in the International Phonetic Alphabet, while the corresponding affricates are ⟨tʃ⟩ (voiceless) and ⟨dʒ⟩ (voiced). (For the affricates, tied symbols ⟨t͡ʃ⟩ ⟨d͡ʒ⟩ or unitary Unicode symbols ⟨ʧ⟩ ⟨ʤ⟩ are sometimes used instead, especially in languages that make a distinction between an affricate and a sequence of stop + fricative.) Examples of words with these sounds in English are shin [ʃ], chin [tʃ], gin [dʒ] and vision [ʒ] (in the middle of the word).

Like most other coronal consonants, palato-alveolar consonants can be articulated either with the tip or blade of the tongue, and are correspondingly called apical or laminal. Speakers of English use both variants, and it does not appear to significantly affect the sound of the consonants.^{[1][failed verification]}