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Home > Affricate consonant

An affricate is a consonant that begins like a stop (most often an alveovelar, such as [t] or [d]) but ends with a fricative or, in one language, a trilled release. The English sounds spelt "ch" and "j" ( transcribed [tʃ] and [dʒ] (or [tS] and [dZ] in SAMPA)), German and Italian z [ts] and Italian z [dz] 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 labial affricates, such as [pf] in German, and velar affricates, such as [kx] in Setswana (written kg) or High Alemannic Swiss German dialects. Worldwide, only a few languages have affricates in these positions, even though the corresponding stop consonants are virtually universal. Also quite uncommon are alveovelar affricates where the fricative is lateral, such as the [tl] sound found in Nahuatl and TotonacThe Totonac are a Native American people in the state of Veracruz, Mexico. Totonac" is also the name of their native language; most now speak the Spanish language, some in addition to the traditional tongue. The Totonac built the Pre-Columbian city of El.

An affricate is a single speech segment, not a sequence of two sounds. In fact, in some languages (e.g. Polish) affricate and "stop plus fricative" clusters contrast phonemically, as in czysta 'clean (f.)' [tʃ...] versus trzysta 'three hundred' [t|ʃ...] (the vertical line separates segments). In English the cluster [ts] occurs, as in bats, but it doesn't function as an affricate.

See also

PhoneticsPhonetics is the study of speech sounds ( voice). It is concerned with the actual nature of the sounds and their production, as opposed to phonology, which operates at the level of sound systems and linguistic units called phonemes. Discussions of meaning

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Affricate consonantAn affricate is a consonant that begins like a stop (most often an alveovelar, such as [t] or [d]) but ends with a fricative or, in one language, a trilled release. The English sounds spelt "ch" and "j" ( transcribed [t] and [d] (or [tS] and [dZ] in SAMPA  
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