The voiced palato-alveolar fricative or domed postalveolar fricative is a type of consonantal sound, used in some spokenlanguages. The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents this sound is <>, and the equivalent X-SAMPA symbol is Z. An alternative symbol used in some older and American linguistic literature is <ž>, a z with a háček. The sound occurs in many languages and, as in English and French, may have simultaneous lip rounding , although this is rarely indicated in transcription.
See more at Wikipedia.org...