Voiceless palatal stop

The voiceless palatal stop or voiceless palatal plosive is a type of consonantal sound, used in some vocal languages. The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents this sound is $\langle\rangle$.

If distinction is necessary, the voiceless alveolo-palatal stop may be transcribed, , or.

The sound does not exist as a phoneme in English, but is perhaps most similar to a voiceless postalveolar affricate, as in English chop (although it is a stop, not an affricate; the most similar stop phoneme to this sound in English is , as in cute), and because it is difficult to get the tongue to touch just the hard palate without also touching the back part of the alveolar ridge, is a less common sound worldwide than. It is also common for the symbol to be used to represent a palatalized voiceless velar stop or palato-alveolar/alveolo-palatal affricates, for example in the Indic languages. This may be considered appropriate when the place of articulation needs to be specified and the distinction between stop and affricate is not contrastive, and therefore of secondary importance.

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