Alveolo-palatal consonant

In phonetics, alveolo-palatal (or alveopalatal) consonants are palatalized postalveolar sounds. They are usually fricatives and affricates. We pronounce them with the blade of the tongue behind the alveolar ridge, and the body of the tongue raised toward the palate. These consonants are similar to palato-alveolar consonants, but alveolo-palatal consonants are more fully palatalized.

 Sibilants 
We often use the alveolo-palatal sibilants in the Chinese languages (e.g.Mandarin, Hakka, and Wu), and other languages in the East Asian sprachbund (e.g.Japanese and Korean). Many slavic languages (e.g.Polish, Russian and Serbo-Croatian) also contains alveolo-palatal sibilants. Northwest Caucasian languages (e.g. Abkhaz and  Ubykh) also use this consonant. Kinnauri uses an alveolo-palatal nasal. The alveolo-palatal consonants in the International Phonetic Alphabet are: 

 IPA Description Example Language Orthography IPA Meaning  Voiceless alveolo-palatal fricative Mandarin  (xiǎo)  small  Voiced alveolo-palatal fricative Polish   herb  Voiceless alveolo-palatal affricate Serbo-Croatian kuća/кућа  house  Voiced alveolo-palatal affricate Japanese  (jishin)  earthquake

 Stops, nasals and liquids 
The sinological circles sometimes use (), (), and () for alveolo-palatal plosives, nasals and liquids. But the IPA does not accept these symbols. We sometimes use these symbol to represent simple palatal or platalized consonants. 

We consider the Polish nasal (represented with the letter ń) to be alveolo-palatal, but not palatal. And the "palatal" consonants of several Indigenous Australian languages are also sometimes judged closer to alveolo-palatal in their articulation.

 Non-standard IPA Description Example Language Orthography Non-standard IPA Standard IPA Meaning  Voiceless alveolo-palatal stop Korean /   dust  Voiced alveolo-palatal stop Korean /   firefly  Alveolo-palatal nasal Yi language ꑌ (nyi)   sit  Alveolo-palatal lateral Catalan ull   eye

References

Category:Consonants