Voiceless alveolo palatal affricate

The voiceless alveolo-palatal sibilant affricate is a type of consonantal sound, used in some spoken languages. The symbols in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represent this sound are ⟨t͡ɕ⟩, ⟨t͜ɕ⟩, ⟨c͡ɕ⟩ and ⟨c͜ɕ⟩, and the equivalent X-SAMPA symbols are t_s and c_s, though transcribing the stop component with ⟨c⟩ (c in X-SAMPA) is rare. The tie bar is sometimes omitted, yielding ⟨tɕ⟩ or ⟨cɕ⟩ in the IPA and ts or cs in X-SAMPA. This is potentially problematic in case of at least some affricates, because there are languages that contrast certain affricates with stop-fricative sequences. Polish words czysta ('clean (f.)', pronounced with an affricate /t͡ʂ/) and trzysta ('three hundred', pronounced with a sequence /tʂ/) are an example of a minimal pair based on such a contrast.

Neither [t] nor [c] are a completely narrow transcription of the stop component, which can be narrowly transcribed as [t̠ʲ] (retracted and palatalized [t]) or [c̟] (advanced [c]). The equivalent X-SAMPA symbols are t_-' or t_-_j and c_+, respectively.

This affricate used to have a dedicated symbol ⟨ʨ⟩, which was one of the six dedicated symbols for affricates in the International Phonetic Alphabet. It occurs in languages such as Mandarin Chinese, Polish, Serbo-Croatian, and Russian, and is the sibilant equivalent of voiceless palatal affricate.