 Affricate

An affricate is a consonant with a complete closure followed by a fricated release, treated as one coordinated sound in the analysis of a language. It combines a stop-like beginning with turbulence during release. This manner of articulation differs from a freely combined consonant cluster containing a plosive and a fricative.^[ref]

English jet begins with the affricate [d͡ʒ]; chair begins with [t͡ʃ]. The tie in these transcriptions signals the intended grouping. A recording can reveal the closure and following frication, but those phases alone do not settle whether a language organizes the sound as one unit or two. Contrasts, distribution and articulatory coordination provide further evidence. Counting written letters is especially unreliable: the two letters ch can represent one affricate.