Voiced palatal affricate

The voiced palatal affricate is a type of consonantal sound, used in some spoken languages. The symbols in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represent this sound are ⟨ɟ͡ʝ⟩ and ⟨ɟ͜ʝ⟩, and the equivalent X-SAMPA symbol is J\_j\. The tie bar may be omitted, yielding ⟨ɟʝ⟩ in the IPA and J\j\ in X-SAMPA.

This sound is the non-sibilant equivalent of the voiced alveolo-palatal affricate.

It occurs in languages such as Albanian, and Skolt Sami, among others. The voiced palatal affricate is quite rare; it is mostly absent from Europe as a phoneme (it occurs as an allophone in most Spanish dialects), with the aforementioned Uralic languages and Albanian being exceptions. It usually occurs with its voiceless counterpart, the voiceless palatal affricate.