Voiceless alveolar affricate

The 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 $\langle\rangle$ or $\langle\rangle$ (formerly with $\langle\rangle$). The voiceless alveolar affricate occurs in may Indo-European languages, such as German, Cantonese, Russian and other Slavic languages such as Polish or Serbo-Croatian, Georgian, Pashto; in Japanese and Mandarin Chinese, among many others. International auxiliary languages, such as Esperanto, Ido and Interlingua also include this sound.

Features
Features of the 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 (commonly called "dental"), 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.