High Quality Content by WIKIPEDIA articles! The voiced 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 ? (crossed-tail j), and the equivalent X-SAMPA symbol is j. The voiced palatal fricative is a very rare sound, occurring in only seven of the 317 languages surveyed by the origical UCLA Phonological Segment Inventory Database.[citation needed] In only three of the languages (Komi, Margi, Belgian Standard Dutch) this sound occurs along with its voiceless counterpart.