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  and , though transcribing the stop component with ⟨c⟩ (  in X-SAMPA) is rare. The tie bar may be omitted, yielding ⟨tɕ⟩ or ⟨cɕ⟩ in the IPA and  or   in X-SAMPA.

Neither nor  are a completely narrow transcription of the stop component, which can be narrowly transcribed as  (retracted and palatalized ) or  (advanced ). The equivalent X-SAMPA symbols are  or   and , respectively. There is also a dedicated symbol ⟨ȶ⟩, which is not a part of the IPA. Therefore, narrow transcriptions of the voiceless alveolo-palatal sibilant affricate include, and.

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

Features
Features of the voiceless alveolo-palatal affricate: