An affricate is a consonant that begins as a stop and releases as a fricative, generally with the same place of articulation (most often coronal). It is often difficult to decide if a stop and fricative form a single phoneme or a consonant pair. English has two affricate phonemes, and , often spelled ch and j, respectively.
Examples
The English sounds spelled "ch" and "j" (broadly transcribed as and in the IPA), German and Italian z and Italian z are typical affricates, and sounds like these are fairly common in the world's languages, as are other affricates with similar sounds, such as those in Polish and Chinese. However, voiced affricates other than are relatively uncommon. For several places of articulation they are not attested at all.
Much less common are labiodental affricates, such as in German and Izi, or velar affricates, such as in Tswana (written kg) or in High Alemannic Swiss German dialects. Worldwide, relatively few languages have affricates in these positions even though the corresponding stop consonants, and , are common or virtually universal. Also less common are alveolar affricates where the fricative release is lateral, such as the sound found in Nahuatl and Navajo. Some other Athabaskan languages, such as Dene Suline, have unaspirated, aspirated, and ejective series of affricates whose release may be dental, alveolar, postalveolar, or lateral: , , , , , , , , , , , and .
Notation
Affricates are transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet by a combination of two letters, one for the stop element and the other for the fricative element. In order to show that these are parts of a single consonant, a tie bar is generally used. The tie bar appears most commonly above the two letters, but may be placed under them if it fits better there, or simply because it is more legible. Thus:
or
.
A less common notation indicates the release of the affricate with a superscript:
This is derived from the IPA convention of indicating other releases with a superscript. However, this convention is more typically used for a fricated release that is too brief to be considered a true affricate.
Though they are no longer standard IPA, ligatures are available in Unicode for the sibilant affricates: . Any of these notations can be used to distinguish an affricate from a sequence of a stop plus a fricative, which is contrastive in languages such as Polish. However, in languages where there is no such distinction, such as English, the tie bars are commonly dropped.
In other phonetic transcription systems, such as the Americanist system, affricates may be transcribed with single letters. The affricates , , , , , are transcribed respectively as or ; , , or (older) ; or ; , , or (older) ; ; and or . Within the IPA, and are sometimes transcribed with the symbols for the palatal stops, and .
Affricates vs. stop–fricative sequences
In some languages, affricates contrast phonemically with stop–fricative sequences: Polish affricate in czysta 'clean (f.)' versus stop–fricative in trzysta 'three hundred'. Klallam affricate in k'ʷə́nc 'look at me' versus stop–fricative in k'ʷə́nts 'he looks at it'.
The exact phonetic difference varies between languages. In stop–fricative sequences, the stop has a release burst before the fricative starts; but in affricates, the fricative element is the release. Phonologically, stop–fricative sequences may have a syllable boundary between the two segments, but not necessarily.
In English, and (nuts, nods) are considered phonemically stop–fricative sequences. They often contain a morpheme boundary (for example, nuts = nut + s). The English affricate phonemes and do not generally contain morpheme boundaries. Depending on dialect, English speakers may distinguish an affricate from a stop–fricative sequence in some contexts such as when the sequence occurs across syllable boundaries:
worst shin →
worse chin →
The in 'worst shin' debuccalizes to a glottal stop before in many dialects, making it phonetically distinct from .
Stop–fricatives can be distinguished acoustically from affricates by the rise time of the frication noise, which is shorter for affricates. (Howell & Rosen 1983, Johnson 2003, Mitani et al. 2006 ).
List of affricates
In the case of coronals, the symbols are normally used for the stop portion of the affricate regardless of place. For example, is commonly seen for .
The exemplar languages are ones that have been reported to have these sounds, but in several cases, they may need confirmation.
