The voiced palatal stop is a type of consonantal sound, used in some spoken languages. The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents this sound is ⟨ ɟ⟩, a barred dotless ⟨j⟩ which was initially created by turning the type for a lowercase letter ⟨f⟩. The equivalent X-SAMPA symbol is J\.

The sound does not exist as a phoneme in English, but is perhaps most similar to a voiced postalveolar affricate [dʒ], as in English jump (although it is a stop, not an affricate; the most similar stop phoneme to this sound in English is [ɡ], as in argue), 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,[ɟ] is a less common sound worldwide than [dʒ]. It is also common for the symbol /ɟ/ to be used to represent a palatalized voiced velar stop, or other similar 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.

In phonetics and phonology, a palatal stop is a type of consonantal sound, made with the body of the tongue in contact with the hard palate (hence palatal), held tightly enough to block the passage of air (hence a stop consonant). Note that a stop consonant made with the tip of the tongue curled back against the palate is called a retroflex stop.

Palatal stops are less common than velar stops or alveolar stops, and do not occur in English; however, they are somewhat similar to the English postalveolar affricates [tʃ] and [dʒ], as in chat and jet. They do occur, for example, in various European languages, such as Hungarian, Icelandic, and Irish.

The term "palatal stop" is in fact sometimes used imprecisely to refer to postalveolar affricates (which themselves come in numerous varieties) or to other acoustically similar sounds such as palatalized velar stops.

The most common sound is the voiced nasal [ ɲ]. More generally, several kinds are distinguished: