Voiceless palatal fricative

A voiceless palatal fricative is a type of consonantal sound used in some spoken languages. The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents this sound is ⟨ç⟩. It is the non-sibilant equivalent of the voiceless alveolo-palatal fricative. Palatal fricatives are relatively rare phonemes, and only 5% of the world's languages have /ç/ as a phoneme. The sound further occurs as an allophone of /x/ (e.g. in German or Greek), or, in other languages, of /h/ in the vicinity of front vowels.