Latin Small Letter Tesh Digraph

Latin Small Letter Tesh Digraph at U+02A7 is a phonetic letter that represents the voiceless postalveolar affricate, the sound at the start and end of English “church.” It belongs to the IPA Extensions block and is a single encoded form of the t-plus-esh affricate symbol used in phonetic transcription. Its main use is in linguistics, dictionaries, language teaching materials, and speech documentation where older or compact IPA typography is being preserved. A transcription may use ʧ for the consonant in English “chip,” Italian “ciao,” or Spanish-influenced pronunciations of “ch,” depending on the language being described. Modern IPA practice more often writes this affricate as a sequence with a tie mark or as adjacent letters, so this digraph is especially common in legacy phonetic fonts, converted print works, and databases that need to retain the exact symbol from a source. It can be confused with the two separate letters t and esh in searching or text processing, so exact character matching matters when cleaning phonetic data.