Voiced palatal plosive

A voiced palatal plosive or stop is a type of consonantal sound in some spoken languages. The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents this sound is ⟨ɟ⟩, a barred dotless ⟨j⟩ that was initially created by turning the type for a lowercase letter ⟨f⟩.

If a distinction is necessary, a voiced alveolo-palatal plosive may be transcribed ⟨d̠ʲ⟩ (retracted and palatalized [d]) or ⟨ɟ᫈⟩ (advanced [ɟ], depending on the linguistic analysis of that sound. There is also a para-IPA letter ⟨ȡ⟩ that is used primarily in Sinological phonetic notation.

[ɟ] is a less common sound worldwide than the voiced postalveolar affricate [d͡ʒ] because it is difficult to get the tongue to touch just the hard palate without also touching the back part of the alveolar ridge.

It is common for the symbol ⟨ɟ⟩ to be used to transcribe a palatalized voiced velar plosive [ɡʲ] or, as often in the Indo-Aryan languages, a postalveolar affricate [dʒ] – especially in phonemic notation. The latter may be appropriate when the place of articulation needs to be specified but the distinction between plosive and affricate is not contrastive, or simply for a cleaner transcription.