A voiced labial–palatal (or labio-palatal) approximant is a type of consonantal sound, used in some spoken languages, for example, French , read as [ɥitjɛm]. It has two constrictions in the vocal tract: with the tongue on the palate, and rounded at the lips. The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents this sound is , a rotated lowercase letter .
A labial–palatal approximant can in many cases be considered the semivocalic equivalent of the close front rounded vowel . They alternate with each other in certain languages, such as French, and in the diphthongs of some languages, and with the non-syllabic diacritic are used in different transcription systems to represent the same sound. Sometimes, is written in place of , even though the former symbol denotes an extra-short in the official IPA.
Some languages, though, have a palatal approximant that is unspecified for rounding, and therefore cannot be considered the semivocalic equivalent of either or its unrounded counterpart . An example of such a language is Spanish, in which a labialized palatal approximant (non-semivowel) appears allophonically with back vowels in words such as ayuda ('help'), while unrounded elsewhere, such as ayer ('yesterday'). Therefore, according to some sources, it is not correct to transcribe this sound with the symbol , which has a different kind of rounding, or with a modified , which according to the same sources cannot be rounded at all; the only suitable transcription is . See for more information.
There is also a labialized post-palatal or pre-velar approximant in some languages, which is articulated slightly more back compared with the place of articulation of the prototypical labialized palatal approximant, though not as back as the prototypical labialized velar approximant. It can be considered the semivocalic equivalent of the close central rounded vowel . The International Phonetic Alphabet does not have a separate symbol for that sound, though it can be transcribed as (a retracted ), (centralized ), (advanced ), or (centralized ). These symbols may be used separately to distinguish compressed (exolabial) and protruded (endolabial) rounding, as in vs or vs . Other possible transcriptions include (a centralized and labialized ) and (a non-syllabic ). The para-IPA symbols (barred ) may also be used for the exolabial and endolabial variants of the post-palatal approximant respectively, and are scheduled to be supported by Unicode in September 2026.
Compressed palatal approximant
A compressed palatal approximant is typically transcribed in IPA simply as , and that is the convention used in this article. There is no dedicated diacritic for compression in the IPA. However, the compression of the lips can be shown with the letter as (simultaneous and labial compression) or ( modified with labial compression). The spread-lip diacritic may also be used with a labialized approximant letter (or ) as an ad hoc symbol, though technically 'spread' means unrounded.
A compressed post-palatal or pre-velar approximant