Affricate consonant

Affricate consonants begin like stopss (most often an alveovelar, such as or ) and that doesn't have a release of its own, but opens directly into a fricative such as or (or, in one language, into a trill).

Samples

The English sounds spelt "ch" and "j" (transcribed and in IPA), German and Italian z and Italian z are typical affricates. These sounds are fairly common in the world's languages, as are other affricates with similar sounds, such as those in Polish and Chinese.

Much less common are e.g. labiodental affricates, such as in German, or velar affricates, such as in Setswana (written kg) or High Alemannic Swiss German dialects (depending on the dialect also uvular ). Worldwide, only a few languages have affricates in these positions, even though the corresponding stop consonants are virtually universal. Also less common are alveolar affricates where the fricative is lateral, such as the sound found in Nahuatl and Totonac. Many Athabaskan languages (such as Chipewyan and Navajo) have series of coronal affricates which may be unaspirated, aspirated, or ejective in addition to being interdental/dental, alveolar, postalveolar, or lateral, i.e. , , , , , , , , , , , and .

Notation

Affricates are often represented by the two sounds they consist of (e.g. , ). However, single signs for the affricates may be desirable, in order to stress that they function as unitary speech segments (i.e. as phonemes). In this case, the IPA recommends to join the two elements of the affricate by a tie bar (e.g. , ). The ligatures are available in Unicode for six common affricates , , , , , and .

Another method is to indicate the frication part of the affricate with a superscript, e.g. , .

In other phonetic transcription systems, such as the Americanist system, the affricates , , , , , and (also written ) are represented as , , , , , and respectively.

Affricates vs. stop-fricative sequences

Affricates can contrast with stop-fricative sequences. Examples include:
: Polish: in czysta 'clean (f.)' vs. in trzysta 'three hundred',
and
: Klallam: in 'look at me' vs. in 'he looks at it'.

The difference is that in the stop-fricative sequence, the stop has a release of its own before the fricative starts. It may have a syllable boundary between the stop and the fricative (always in English).

Affricates and stop-fricative sequences are also distinguished phonemically. In English, and (as in nuts and nods) are considered to be sequences of a stop phoneme and a fricative phoneme even though they are phonetically affricates, because they may have a morpheme boundary in them (e.g. nuts is nut + s). The real English affricate phonemes and cannot have a morpheme boundary, and in order to show that they are not sequences of phonemes, they can be written with the ligatures or tie bars, or different characters and , avoiding the ambiguous and .