The voiceless palato-alveolar sibilant affricate or voiceless domed postalveolar sibilant affricate is a type of consonantal sound used in some spoken languages. The sound is transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet with ⟨t͡ʃ ⟩, ⟨t͜ʃ ⟩ ⟨tʃ ⟩ (formerly the ligature ⟨ʧ ⟩), or, in broad transcription, ⟨c⟩. This affricate has a dedicated symbol, which has been retired by the International Phonetic Association but is still used. The alternative commonly used in American tradition is ⟨č⟩. It is familiar to English speakers as the "ch" sound in "chip". Historically, this sound often derives from a former voiceless velar stop (as in English church; also in Gulf Arabic, Slavic languages, Indo-Iranian languages and Romance languages), or a voiceless dental stop by way of palatalization, especially next to a front vowel (as in English nature; also in Amharic, Portuguese, some accents of Egyptian, etc.).

Features

Features of the voiceless domed postalveolar affricate:

Occurrence

Mandarin Chinese, Russian, Japanese, Korean, Mongolian, Polish, Catalan, and Thai have a voiceless alveolo-palatal affricate ; this is technically postalveolar but it is less precise to use.

Related characters

There are several Unicode characters based on the tesh digraph (ʧ):

Voiceless postalveolar non-sibilant affricate

Features

Occurrence