Avoiceless palatal affricate is a type ofconsonantal sound, used in somespokenlanguages. The symbols in theInternational Phonetic Alphabet that represent this sound are ⟨c͡ç⟩ and ⟨c͜ç⟩. The tie bar may be omitted, yielding ⟨cç⟩.

This sound is the non-sibilant equivalent of thevoiceless alveolo-palatal affricate.

A voiceless palatal affricate occurs in such languages asHungarian andSkolt Sami, among others. The consonant is quite rare; it is mostly absent fromEurope (with theUralic languages andAlbanian being exceptions). It usually occurs with its voiced counterpart, thevoiced palatal affricate.

There is also avoiceless post-palatal affricate^[1] in some languages, which is articulated slightly more back compared with the place of articulation of the prototypical voiceless palatal affricate, though not as back as the prototypicalvoiceless velar affricate. The International Phonetic Alphabet does not have a separate symbol for that sound, though it can be transcribed as ⟨c̠͡ç̠⟩, ⟨c͡ç˗⟩ (both symbols denote aretracted ⟨c͡ç⟩) or ⟨k̟͡x̟⟩ (advanced ⟨k͡x⟩) - this article uses only the first symbol.

Especially inbroad transcription, a voiceless post-palatal affricate may be transcribed as a palatalized voiceless velar affricate (⟨k͡xʲ⟩ or ⟨k͜xʲ⟩.

Features of a voiceless palatal affricate:

• Itsmanner of articulation isaffricate, which means it is produced by first stopping the airflow entirely, then allowing air flow through a constricted channel at the place of articulation, causing turbulence. It is not asibilant.
• Itsplace of articulation ispalatal, which means it is articulated with the middle or back part of thetongue raised to thehard palate. The otherwise identical post-palatal variant is articulated slightly behind the hard palate, making it sound slightly closer to the velar[k͡x].
• Itsphonation is voiceless, which means it is produced without vibrations of the vocal cords. In some languages the vocal cords are actively separated, so it is always voiceless; in others the cords are lax, so that it may take on the voicing of adjacent sounds.
• It is anoral consonant, which means that air is not allowed to escape through the nose.
• It is acentral consonant, which means it is produced by directing the airstream along the center of the tongue, rather than to the sides.
• Itsairstream mechanism ispulmonic, which means it is articulated by pushing air only with theintercostal muscles andabdominal muscles, as in most sounds.

• Index of phonetics articles

• List of languages with[cç] onPHOIBLE

• Affricates
• Palatal consonants
• Pulmonic consonants
• Voiceless oral consonants
• Central consonants

• Pages using the Phonos extension
• Pages with plain IPA
• CS1 foreign language sources (ISO 639-2)
• Articles with short description
• Short description is different from Wikidata
• Articles containing Albanian-language text
• Wikipedia articles needing page number citations from July 2025
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• CS1 Norwegian-language sources (no)