affricaten

Affrikaten are a class of consonant sounds in phonetics, typically referred to in English as affricates. The term is the German plural of Affrikat and is used in German-language linguistic writing to denote this category of sounds.

An affrikat is produced by a brief stop closure at a given place of articulation, followed by a near-simultaneous release into a fricative at the same place. This creates a single complex consonant, rather than two separate segments. They can be voiceless or voiced and occur at several places of articulation, most commonly at alveolar and postalveolar regions, with others found in bilabial or other areas.

In phonological description, affrikaten behave as obstruents and may contrast with plain stops or pure fricatives. They can function as phonemic units in a language, or arise as realizations of sequences of a stop plus a fricative. Some languages maintain a full set of affricates, while others use affricates as allophones of clusters or as secondary realizations in fluent speech. Historical linguistics often accounts for affricates as later developments from old clusters of stops + fricatives, though they may also be inherited as distinct phonemes.

Transcription of affrikaten in the International Phonetic Alphabet typically uses ligatured symbols such as [t͡s], [d͡z], [t͡ʃ], [d͡ʒ], [p͡f], and related rows. Orthographic representations vary by language, including digraphs and single-letter systems in non-Latin scripts. In many languages, affrikaten contribute to contrasts that are not possible with stops or fricatives alone, enriching the consonant inventories of those languages.