Voiced palatal implosive

Content sourced from Wikipedia, licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.

Voiced palatal implosive is a consonant sound used in some languages. It is made with the tongue raised toward the palate and the air moving inward (implosive) while the vocal cords vibrate (voiced).

In the International Phonetic Alphabet, this sound is written as ʄ, a dotless j with a horizontal stroke. The symbol comes from modifying the symbol for the voiced palatal stop and adding a rightward hook to show implosion. A similar-looking letter, ƒ (f with a tail), is used in Ewe for a different sound (ɸ).

There is also a related sound called the voiced post-palatal (or pre-velar) implosive. The IPA doesn’t have a separate symbol for it, so linguists write it as ʄ̠ or ʄ˗ or ɠ̟ or ɠ˖ to indicate small differences in where the sound is made.