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 $\langle\rangle$. The symbol ç is the letter c with a cedilla, as used to spell French and Portuguese words such as façade and ação. However, the sound represented by the letter ç in French, Portuguese and English orthography is not a voiceless palatal fricative but, the voiceless alveolar fricative.

Palatal fricatives are relatively rare phonemes, and only 5% of the world's languages have as a phoneme. The sound occurs, however, as an allophone of in German, or, in other languages, of  in the vicinity of front vowels.

There is also a voiceless post-palatal fricative (also called pre-velar, fronted velar etc.) in some languages.