Voiceless postalveolar affricate

The voiceless palato-alveolar sibilant affricate or voiceless domed postalveolar sibilant affricate is a type of consonantal sound used in some spoken languages. The sound is transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet with ⟨t͡ʃ&thinsp;⟩, ⟨t͜ʃ&thinsp;⟩ ⟨tʃ&thinsp;⟩ (formerly the ligature ⟨ʧ&thinsp;⟩), or, in broad transcription, ⟨c⟩. The alternative commonly used in American tradition is $⟨č⟩$. It is familiar to English speakers as the "ch" sound in "chip".

Historically, this sound often derives from a former voiceless velar stop (as in English church; also in Gulf Arabic, Slavic languages, Indo-Iranian languages and Romance languages), or a voiceless dental stop  by way of palatalization, especially next to a front vowel (as in English nature; also in Amharic, Portuguese, some accents of Egyptian, etc.).

Features
Features of the voiceless domed postalveolar affricate:

Occurrence
Mandarin Chinese, Russian, Japanese, Korean, Mongolian, Polish, Catalan, and Thai have a voiceless alveolo-palatal affricate ; this is technically postalveolar but it is less precise to use.

Related characters
There are several Unicode characters based on the tesh digraph (ʧ):
 * is an IPA superscript letter
 * is used in phonetic transcription
 * has been used in phonetic descriptions of Polish

Features

 * Its place of articulation is postalveolar, which means it is articulated with either the tip or the blade of the tongue behind the alveolar ridge.