Voiced alveolar fricative

The voiced alveolar fricatives are consonantal sounds. The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents these sounds depends on whether a sibilant or non-sibilant fricative is being described.


 * The symbol for the alveolar sibilant is ⟨⟩, and the equivalent X-SAMPA symbol is z. The IPA letter ⟨z⟩ is not normally used for dental or postalveolar sibilants unless modified by a diacritic (⟨⟩ and ⟨⟩ respectively).
 * The IPA symbol for the alveolar non-sibilant fricative is derived by means of diacritics; it can be ⟨⟩ or ⟨⟩.

Voiced alveolar sibilant
The voiced alveolar sibilant is common across European languages but is relatively uncommon cross-linguistically compared to the voiceless variant. Only about 28% of the world's languages contain a voiced dental or alveolar sibilant. Moreover, 85% of the languages with some form of are languages of Europe, Africa or Western Asia.

In the eastern half of Asia, the Pacific and the Americas, is very rare as a phoneme. The presence of in a given language always implies the presence of a voiceless.

Features
Features of the voiced alveolar fricative:

Occurrence
In the following transcriptions, diacritics may be used to distinguish between apical and laminal.