The voiceless palatal plosive or stop is a type of consonantal sound used in some vocal languages. The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents this sound is ⟨c⟩, and the equivalent X-SAMPA symbol is c. It is common for the phonetic symbol ⟨c⟩ to be used to represent voiceless postalveolar affricate [t͡ʃ] 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 plosive and affricate is not contrastive.