Voiceless alveolar affricate

A voiceless alveolar affricate is a type of affricate consonant pronounced with the tip or blade of the tongue against the alveolar ridge just behind the teeth. There are several types of median affricates with significant perceptual differences:

A voiceless alveolar sibilant affricate is the most common type, similar to the ts in English cats.
A voiceless alveolar non-sibilant affricate - or, using the alveolar diacritic from the Extended IPA, - is somewhat similar to the th in some pronunciations of English eighth. It is found as a regional realization of the sequence in some Sicilian dialects of Standard Italian.
A voiceless alveolar retracted sibilant affricate, also called apico-alveolar or grave, has a weak hushing sound reminiscent of affricates. One language in which it is found is Basque, where it contrasts with a more conventional non-retracted laminal alveolar affricate.

This article discusses the first two.

Voiceless alveolar sibilant affricate

A voiceless alveolar sibilant affricate is a type of consonantal sound, used in some spoken languages. The sound is transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet with or. The tie bar may be omitted, yielding. There is also a ligature, which has been retired by the International Phonetic Association but is still used. A voiceless alveolar affricate occurs in many Indo-European languages, such as German, Kashmiri, Marathi,
Pashto, Russian and most other Slavic languages such as Polish and Serbo-Croatian; also, among many others, in Georgian, in Mongolia, and Tibetan Sanskrit, in Japanese, in Mandarin Chinese, and in Cantonese. Some international auxiliary languages, such as Esperanto, Ido and Interlingua also include this sound.

Features of a voiceless alveolar sibilant affricate:

The stop component of this affricate is laminal alveolar, which means it is articulated with the blade of the tongue at the alveolar ridge. For simplicity, this affricate is usually called after the sibilant fricative component.
There are at least three specific variants of the fricative component:
* Dentalized laminal alveolar, which means it is articulated with the tongue blade very close to the upper front teeth, with the tongue tip resting behind lower front teeth. The hissing effect in this variety of is very strong.
* Non-retracted alveolar, which means it is articulated with either the tip or the blade of the tongue at the alveolar ridge, termed respectively apical and laminal.
* Retracted alveolar, which means it is articulated with either the tip or the blade of the tongue slightly behind the alveolar ridge, termed respectively apical and laminal. Acoustically, it is close to or laminal.
Occurrence