Week 6: The Affricate Sounds

The Affricate Sounds

As it happens in Spanish, English has a voiced and voiceless affricate consonant. Other languages may have some other affricate sounds such as Japanese, which has a /ts/-combination, like in the word tsunami.

How are these particular sounds produced? An affricate is a consonant characterized as having both a fricative and stop manner of production. That is, your tongue is in the alveolar ridge, right behind your teeth, and the airstream is released from a stop position to a frication-like release of the air.

There are only two members in this group:

1. the voiced affricate or /dʒ/, and

2. the voiceless affricate or /tʃ/.

Both of these sounds are a set of sister phonemes. And as it can be seen in the chart below, they are pretty much the same ones we have in Spanish.

Sound	Spanish	English
/dʒ/	voiced affricate palatal	voiced affricate palatal
/tʃ/	voiceless affricate palatal	voiceless affricate palatal

Although these sounds look alike in both languages, you may be very surprised to realize that they can be a pronunciation problem for Spanish speakers when they are found in final position.