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Affricate consonant
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Affricate consonants begin as stops (most often an alveolar, such as or ) but release as a fricative (such as or or occasionally into a fricative trill) rather than directly into the following vowel.
Samples
The English sounds spelled "ch" and "j" (transcribed and in IPA), German and Italian z and Italian z/z are typical affricates. These sounds are fairly common in the world's languages, as are other affricates with similar sounds, such as those in Polish and Chinese.
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Encyclopedia
Affricate consonants begin as stops (most often an alveolar, such as or ) but release as a fricative (such as or or occasionally into a fricative trill) rather than directly into the following vowel.
Samples
The English sounds spelled "ch" and "j" (transcribed and in IPA), German and Italian z and Italian z/z are typical affricates. These sounds are fairly common in the world's languages, as are other affricates with similar sounds, such as those in Polish and Chinese. However, other than , voiced affricates are relatively uncommon. For several places of articulation they aren't attested at all.
Much less common are e.g. labiodental affricates, such as in German, or velar affricates, such as in Tswana (written kg) or High Alemannic Swiss German dialects. Worldwide, only a few languages have affricates in these positions, even though the corresponding stop consonants are virtually universal. Also less common are alveolar affricates where the fricative is lateral, such as the sound found in Nahuatl and Totonac. Many Athabaskan languages (such as Dene Suline and Navajo) have series of coronal affricates which may be unaspirated, aspirated, or ejective in addition to being interdental/dental, alveolar, postalveolar, or lateral, i.e. , , , , , , , , , , , and .
Notation
Affricates are often represented by the two sounds they consist of (e.g. , ). However, single signs for the affricates may be desirable, in order to stress that they function as unitary speech segments (i.e. as phonemes). In this case, the IPA recommends joining the two elements of the affricate by a tie bar (e.g. , ). Ligatures are available in Unicode for the six common affricates , , , , , and .
Another method is to indicate the release of the affricate with a superscript: , . This is derived from the IPA convention of indicating other releases with a superscript.
In other phonetic transcription systems, such as the Americanist system, the affricates , , , , , and are represented as or ; , , or (older) ; or ; , , or (older) ; ; and or respectively. Within the IPA, and are sometimes transcribed as palatal stops, and .
Affricates vs. stop-fricative sequences
Affricates can contrast phonemically with stop-fricative sequences. Examples include:
- Polish affricate in czysta 'clean (f.)' versus stop–fricative in trzysta 'three hundred',
and
- Klallam affricate in 'look at me' versus stop–fricative in 'he looks at it'.
The difference is that in the stop-fricative sequence, the stop has a release burst before the fricative starts, but in the affricate, the fricative element is the release. Stop-fricative sequences may also have a syllable boundary between the two segments, but this is not necessary.
In English, and (as in nuts and nods) are considered to be sequences of a stop phoneme and a fricative phoneme even though they are phonetically affricates, because they may have a morpheme boundary in them (e.g. nuts is nut + s). The English affricate phonemes and do not require a morpheme boundary, and are sometimes written with the unitary symbols <> and <>, though this is not considered standard IPA notation. However, English does distinguish affricates from stop–fricative sequences:
- cat shit , pronounced
- catch it , pronounced
Here debuccalizes to glottal stop before in many dialects, making it phonetically distinct from .
The acoustic difference between affricates and stop+fricative sequences is rate of amplitude increase of the frication noise, which is known as the rise time. Affricates have a short rise time to the peak frication amplitude while sequences of stop and fricative have relatively longer rise time (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 . For legibility, the tie bars have been removed from the table entries.
The exemplar languages are ones that these sounds have been reported from, but in several cases they may need confirmation.
Sibilant affricates
- Voiceless alveolar affricate (in Italian, German, Hungarian, Lombard, Mayan K'iche', Japanese)
- Voiced alveolar affricate (in Italian, Lombard, Pashto )
- Voiceless postalveolar affricate (in English,Spanish in both cases spelled "ch")
- Voiced postalveolar affricate (English "j" or "soft g")
- Voiceless alveolo-palatal affricate (in Polish, Mandarin, Thai)
- Voiced alveolo-palatal affricate (in Polish, Serbian )
- Voiceless retroflex affricate (in Ubykh and other Northwest Caucasian languages, Mandarin)
- Voiced retroflex affricate (in Ubykh and other Northwest Caucasian languages)
Non-sibilant affricates
- Voiceless bilabial affricate Present reportedly in Scouse English
- Voiceless bilabial-labiodental affricate (in German, Teke)
- Voiced bilabial-labiodental affricate (in Teke)
- Voiceless labiodental affricate (in XiNkuna Tsonga)
- Voiced labiodental affricate (in XiNkuna Tsonga)
- Voiceless dental affricate (in Luo, Dene Suline, Cun, some varieties of Venetian and other North Italian dialects)
- Voiced dental affricate (in Dene Suline)
- Voiceless alveolar nonsibilant affricate (in Mapudungun)
- Voiceless palatal affricate (in Skolt Sami, Hungarian)
- Voiced palatal affricate (in Skolt Sami, Hungarian, some Spanish dialects)
- Voiceless velar affricate (in Tswana, High Alemannic German)
- Voiceless uvular affricate (in Nez Percé, Wolof, Kabardian)
- Voiceless epiglottal affricate (in Haida)
Lateral affricates
Trilled affricates
- Prenasalized trilled bilabial affricate (in Kele)
- Voiceless dental bilabially trilled affricate (in Wari’)
- Voiceless alveolar trilled affricate (in Ngkoth)
- Voiceless retroflex trilled affricate (in Malagasy) (a similar sound in the southern dialect of Mapudungun is reported to vary with .)
- Voiced retroflex trilled affricate (in Malagasy) (a similar sound in Fijian is a prenasalized postalveolar stop that seldom has a trilled release)
Other Affricates
The more common of the voiceless affricates are all attested as ejectives as well: . Several Khoisan languages such as !Xóõ are reported to have voiced ejective affricates, but these may actually be consonant clusters: . Affricates are also commonly aspirated: , occasionally murmured: , and sometimes prenasalized: . Labialized, palatalized, velarized, and pharyngealized affricates also occur. Affricates may also have phonemic length, that is, affected by a chroneme, as in Karelian. While most affricates are homorganic, Navajo and Chiricahua Apache have a heterorganic alveolar-velar affricate (McDonough & Ladefoged 1993, Hoijer & Opler 1938). Other heterorganic affricates are reported for Northern Sotho (Johnson 2003).
See also
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