Voiceless postalveolar affricate
consonantal sound
A voiceless palato-alveolar sibilant affricate or voiceless domed postalveolar sibilant affricate is a type of consonantal sound used in some spoken languages. It is familiar to English-speakers as the "ch" sound in "chip".
This sound is transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet with ⟨tʃ⟩, ⟨t͡ʃ⟩, ⟨t͜ʃ⟩, or in some broad transcriptions ⟨c⟩ (though this is the symbol for a voiceless palatal plosive). There is also a ligature ⟨ʧ⟩, which was retired by the International Phonetic Association but is still used. An alternative commonly used in Americanist tradition is ⟨č⟩.
Historically, [tʃ] often derives from a former voiceless velar stop /k/ (as in English church; also in Gulf Arabic, Slavic languages, Indo-Iranian languages and Romance languages), or a voiceless alveolar stop /t/ 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 a voiceless domed postalveolar affricate:
Its manner of articulation is sibilant affricate, which means it is produced by first stopping the air flow entirely, then directing it with the tongue to the sharp edge of the teeth, causing high-frequency turbulence.
Its place of articulation is postalveolar, which means it is articulated with the tip or blade of the tongue behind the alveolar ridge.
Its phonation is voiceless, which means it is produced without vibrations of the vocal cords. In some languages the vocal cords are actively separated, so it is always voiceless; in others the cords are lax, so that it may take on the voicing of adjacent sounds.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Voiceless postalveolar affricate” is consonantal sound. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Voiceless, postalveolar and affricate, not as a finished interpretation.
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This entry incorporates text from “Voiceless postalveolar affricate” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.