A voiceless alveolar affricate is a type of affricate consonant pronounced with the tip or blade of the tongue against the alveolar ridge (gum line) just behind the teeth. There are several types with significant perceptual differences:

This article discusses the first two.

A 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 ⟨t͡s⟩ or ⟨t͜s⟩ (formerly with ⟨ʦ⟩ or ⟨ƾ⟩). A voiceless alveolar affricate occurs in many Indo-European languages, such as German (which was also part of the High German consonant shift), Kashmiri, Marathi, Pashto, Russian and most other Slavic languages such as Polish and Serbo-Croatian; also, among many others, in Georgian, in Mongolia, and Tibetan Sanskrit, in Japanese, in Mandarin Chinese, and in Cantonese. Some international auxiliary languages, such as Esperanto, Ido and Interlingua also include this sound.

Features of a voiceless alveolar sibilant affricate:

The following sections are named after the fricative component.