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/.

Orthography

Languages of the world represent /ʒ/ in several ways:

Written	Languages
j	French, Portuguese, Romanian, Turkish
ž	Czech
ż	Polish (more exactly [ʑ])
zs	Hungarian
ж	Cyrillic alphabet (quite standard)

Sound changes

To

• In English, /zj/ became /ʒ/. For example, vision /vɪzjən/ → /vɪʒən/
• In Latvian, /dj/ became /dʒ/ and eventually /ʒ/. For example, compare "briedis" ("a deer" (Nom.)) /'bria̯dis/ and "brieža" ("od a deer"(Gen.))/'bria̯ʒa/.

Sources

This page is by Timothy Patrick Snyder. Back to IPA