A voiced postalveolar or palato-alveolar fricative is a type of consonantal sound used in some spoken languages. The International Phonetic Association uses the term voiced postalveolar fricative only for the sound [ʒ], but it also describes the voiced postalveolar non-sibilant fricative [ɹ̠˔], for which there are significant perceptual differences, as one is a sibilant and one is not.

A voiced palato-alveolar fricative or voiced domed postalveolar 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 lower case form of the letter Ezh ⟨Ʒ ʒ⟩ (/ɛʒ/ ^ⓘ). An alternative symbol used in some older and American linguistic literature is ⟨ž⟩, a z with a caron. In some transcriptions of alphabets such as the Cyrillic, the sound is represented by the digraph ⟨zh⟩.

Although present in English, the sound is not represented by a specific letter or digraph, but is formed by yod-coalescence of [z] and [j] in words such as measure. It also appears in some loanwords, mainly from French (thus written with ⟨g⟩ and ⟨j⟩).

[ʒ] occurs as a borrowed phoneme in a number of languages under the influence of French, Persian or Slavic languages, as in the Germanic languages (Dutch, English, German and Luxembourgish), the Romance languages (Italian, and Romanian), the Turkic languages (Azerbaijani, Bashkir, Turkish, and Uyghur), and the Uralic languages (Estonian and Hungarian), Breton and Maltese. The phoneme has the lowest consonant frequency in both English and Persian.

In English and French, /ʒ/ may have simultaneous lip rounding ([ʒʷ]), although this is rarely indicated in transcription.

Features of a voiced palato-alveolar fricative:

The sound in Russian denoted by ⟨ж⟩ is commonly transcribed as a palato-alveolar fricative but is actually a laminal retroflex fricative.