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The voiceless alveolo-palatal affricate is a type of consonantal sound, used in some spoken languages. The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents this sound is [t̠͡ɕ], alternatively but unofficially [ʨ] (entity 680), and the equivalent X-SAMPA symbol is ts\. The voiceless alveolo-palatal affricate occurs in such languages as Mandarin Chinese and Serbo-Croatian.

Features of the voiceless alveolo-palatal affricate:

• Its manner of articulation is sibilant affricate, which means it is produced by first stopping the airflow entirely, then directing it through a groove in the tongue and over the sharp edge of the teeth, causing high-frequency turbulence.
• Its place of articulation is alveolo-palatal, that is, palatalized laminal postalveolar, which means it is articulated with the blade of the tongue behind the alveolar ridge, and the body of the tongue raised toward the palate.
• Its phonation type is voiceless, which means it is produced without vibrations of the vocal cords.
• It is an oral consonant, which means air is allowed to escape through the mouth.
• It is a central consonant, which means it is produced by allowing the airstream to flow over the middle of the tongue, rather than the sides.
• The airstream mechanism is pulmonic egressive, which means it is articulated by pushing air out of the lungs and through the vocal tract, rather than from the glottis or the mouth.

• In Serbian, Croatian and Bosnian (Serbo-Croatian), this sound is represented with Latin letter Ć/ć or Cyrillic letter Ћ/ћ. -ić is a diminutive suffix and the most frequent suffix of surnames, meaning roughly "son of".

• In some Macedonian accents, the letter Ќ is pronounced as a voiceless alveolo-palatal affricate.

• In some varieties of Castillian Spanish, text written "ch" is pronounced using this sound. For example, "chocolate" might be pronounced as if written "tsocolate." A similar tendency is evident in Chile.

• In Upper Sorbian and Lower Sorbian this sound is represented with letter Ć/ć.

• In Polish this sound is represented in two ways: before a consonant and at the end of a word with letter Ć/ć and before a vowel with two letters combination Ci/ci.

• This sound occurs in Mandarin Chinese. It is represented by in pinyin. An aspirated alveolo-palatal affricate, /tɕʰ/, also occurs, and is represented by .

• This sound occurs in Thai. It is represented with letter "จ". An aspirated alveolo-palatal affricate, /tɕʰ/, also occurs, and is represented with letter "ฉ", "ช" and "ฌ".

• This sound occurs in Japanese. It is normally romanized as "ch", and the geminate form is normally romanized as "tch".

• In Korean, it is represented in unaspirated form by the jamo "ㅈ" (IPA: /ʨ/), in aspirated form by the jamo "ㅊ" (IPA: /ʨʰ/), and in tensed/stressed form by the jamo "ㅉ" (IPA: /ʨ͈/).