A palatal fricative is a type of fricative consonant

Fricative consonant

Fricatives are consonants produced by forcing air through a narrow channel made by placing two articulators close together. These may be the lower lip against the upper teeth, in the case of ; the back of the tongue against the soft palate, in the case of German , the final consonant of Bach; or...

 that is also a palatal consonant

Palatal consonant

Palatal consonants are consonants articulated with the body of the tongue raised against the hard palate...

, i.e. pronounced with the body of the tongue in contact with the hard palate

Hard palate

The hard palate is a thin horizontal bony plate of the skull, located in the roof of the mouth. It spans the arch formed by the upper teeth.It is formed by the palatine process of the maxilla and horizontal plate of palatine bone....

. The two main types of palatal fricatives are:

• voiceless palatal fricative
  Voiceless palatal fricative
  The 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 . The symbol ç is the letter c with a cedilla, as used to spell French words such as façade...
  
   (/ç/)
• voiced palatal fricative (/ʝ/)

Palatal fricatives are rare phoneme

Phoneme

In a language or dialect, a phoneme is the smallest segmental unit of sound employed to form meaningful contrasts between utterances....

s, especially the voiced palatal fricative, but they occur somewhat more often as allophone

Allophone

In phonology, an allophone is one of a set of multiple possible spoken sounds used to pronounce a single phoneme. For example, and are allophones for the phoneme in the English language...

s. They may occur as allophones of velar fricative

Velar fricative

Velar fricative can refer to*voiced velar fricative: in the International Phonetic Alphabet*voiceless velar fricative: in the International Phonetic Alphabet...

s in the vicinity of front vowel

Front vowel

A front vowel is a type of vowel sound used in some spoken languages. The defining characteristic of a front vowel is that the tongue is positioned as far in front as possible in the mouth without creating a constriction that would be classified as a consonant. Front vowels are sometimes also...

s (as in German

German language

German is a West Germanic language, related to and classified alongside English and Dutch. With an estimated 90 – 98 million native speakers, German is one of the world's major languages and is the most widely-spoken first language in the European Union....

 in the case of [ç]), or as alternants (whether dialectal, emphatic, etc.) of palatal approximant

Palatal approximant

The palatal approximant is a type of consonantal sound used in many spoken languages. The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents this sound is '...

s (e.g. /j/ often appears as [ʝ] between vowels in Spanish

Spanish language

Spanish , also known as Castilian , is a Romance language in the Ibero-Romance group that evolved from several languages and dialects in central-northern Iberia around the 9th century and gradually spread with the expansion of the Kingdom of Castile into central and southern Iberia during the...

, and /hj-/ at the beginning of words may appear as [ç] in English

English language

English is a West Germanic language that arose in the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of England and spread into what was to become south-east Scotland under the influence of the Anglian medieval kingdom of Northumbria...

, as in "hue", "huge" or "Hubert").