Palatalization

In linguistics, palatalization, also palatization, may refer to two different processes by which a sound, usually a consonant, comes to be produced with the tongue in a position in the mouth near the palate.

In describing the phonetics of an existing language (i.e., in synchronic descriptions), a palatalized consonant is one pronounced with a palatal secondary articulation. This means that the consonant is pronounced as if followed very closely by the sound (a palatal approximant, like the sound of "y" in "yellow"). For example, in the Polish word kiedy ("when"), the letters ki represent a palatalized, indicated in IPA notation as , with a superscript "j". This sound is similar to the combination of "k" and "y" in English "thank you".

The other meaning of palatalization is encountered in historical linguistics, and refers to a sound change in which a consonant's place of articulation becomes closer to the palatal position. This change is often triggered by a following sound or a front vowel. For example, in Italian, before the front vowels e and i, the letter c (which otherwise represents, a velar consonant), has come to be pronounced as the palato-alveolar consonant , like English "ch" (see hard and soft c).

Palatalization of both types is widespread across languages in the world, though its actual manifestation varies. In some languages, such as the Slavic languages, palatal or palatalized consonants are frequently referred to as soft consonants, with others called hard consonants.

The term palatalized vowel is also sometimes used, to refer to a vowel that has become fronter or closer.

Types
In technical terms, palatalization refers to one of several things:


 * A phonetic term of the secondary articulation of consonants by which the body of the tongue is raised toward the hard palate and the alveolar ridge during the articulation of the consonant. Such consonants are phonetically palatalized, and in the International Phonetic Alphabet they are indicated by a superscript ⟨j⟩, as with for a palatalized [t].


 * A common assimilatory process or the result of such a process, which involves front vowels (that is, sounds with a higher second formant such as and ) and/or the palatal approximant  causing nearby phones to shift towards (though not necessarily coming to) the palatal articulatory position or to positions closer to the front of the mouth.

The first may be the result of the second, but they are often different. A vowel may "palatalize" a consonant (sense 2), but the result might not be a palatalized consonant in the phonetic sense (sense 1), or the phonetically palatalized (sense 1) consonant may occur irrespective of adjacency to front vowels.

The word "palatalization" may also be used for the effect a palatal or palatalized consonant exerts on nearby sounds, as in the history of Old French where Bartsch's law turned low vowels into or  after a palatalized velar consonant, or in the Uralic language Erzya, where the near-open low front unrounded vowel  only occurs as an allophone of the open vowel  after a palatalized consonant, as seen in the pronunciation of the name of the language itself,. Something similar may have been the case for some or even all low vowels in Old French, which could explain the palatalization of almost all velar plosives before. However, while the process may be called palatalization, the resulting vowel is not called a palatalized vowel in the phonetic sense. Terminology such as "palatal vowel" is found, but this is primary and not secondary articulation.

Phonetics
"Pure" palatalization is denoted by a small superscript ⟨⟩ in IPA. This is a modification to the articulation of a consonant, where the middle of the tongue is raised, and nothing else. It may produce a laminal articulation of otherwise apical consonants such as and. It is a phonemic feature in some languages; a common misconception is that it is merely allophonic, like in English. Phonemic palatalization may be contrasted with either plain or velarized articulation. In Finnic languages, Baltic languages and Slavic languages, the contrast is with plain consonants, but in Irish, it is with velarized consonants.

Phonetically palatalized consonants may vary in their exact realization. Some, but not all languages add offglides or onglides. In Russian, both plain and palatalized consonant phonemes are found in words like пальто, царь and Катя. Typically, the vowel (especially a non-front vowel) following a palatalized consonant has a palatal offglide. In Hupa, on the other hand, the palatalization is heard as both an onglide and an offglide. In some cases, the realization of palatalization may change without any corresponding phonemic change. For example, according to Thurneysen, palatalized consonants at the end of a syllable in Old Irish had a corresponding onglide (reflected as ⟨i⟩ in the spelling), which was no longer present in Middle Irish (based on explicit testimony of grammarians of the time period).

Palatalization can also occur as a suprasegmental feature that affects the pronunciation of an entire syllable. This is the case in Skolt Sami, a language which is unusual in contrasting suprasegmental palatalization with segmental palatalization (i.e., inherently palatalized consonants).

Mechanism
Palatalization is usually triggered only by mid, close (high) front vowels and the semi-vowel ; but counterexamples to this are also found. In addition, tongue-fronting (a process mainly induced by front vowels) typically affects velar consonants, while tongue-raising typically affects apical and coronal consonants. On the other hand, most of the palatalized consonants also undergo spirantization, except for the palatalized labials.

In Gallo-Romance, Vulgar Latin * became * very early, with the subsequent deaffrication and some further developments of the vowel. For instance:
 * *cattus ('cat') → chat
 * calvus ('bald') → chauve
 * *blanca ('white' fem.) → blanche
 * catena ('chain') → chaine
 * carus ('dear') → cher

Early English borrowings from French show the original affricate, as chamber ('[private] room') < Old French chambre < camera; cf French chambre ('room')

Historical (diachronic) palatalization
Palatalization may result in a phonemic split, that is, a historical change by which a phoneme becomes two new phonemes over time through phonetic palatalization.

Old historical splits have frequently drifted since the time they occurred, and may be independent of current phonetic palatalization. The lenition tendency of palatalized consonants (by assibilation and deaffrication) is important here. According to some analyses, the lenition of the palatalized consonant is still a part of the palatalization process itself.

For example, Votic has undergone such a change historically, in for example *keeli → tšeeli ('language'), but there is currently an additional distinction between palatalized laminal and non-palatalized apical consonants. An extreme example occurs in Spanish, where palatalized ('soft') g has ended up as ; this results from a long process where became palatalized to, then assibilated to , deaffricated to , devoiced to  shifted back to the velar place of articulation (See History of Spanish and ceceo for more information).

While the great majority of palatalization effects are connected with sequences with a consonant adjacent to a high front or mid front vowel or glide, palatalization may occur spontaneously in a sense. In Southwestern Romance, in word-initial clusters with a voiceless obstruent became palatalized, as Latin clamare ('to call') →  Italian chiamare  and Portuguese chamar; in Spanish, the obstruent drops before the palatalized liquid: llamar. Differently, in an even larger area, Latin became  (or even ), thus from a form like Latin octō ('eight') comes French huit, Spanish ocho, and Portuguese oito.

Such phonemic splits due to historic palatalization are common in many other languages. Some English examples of cognate words distinguished by historical palatalization are church vs. kirk, witch vs. wicca, ditch vs. dike, and shirt vs. skirt. The pronunciation of wicca as is a spelling pronunciation based on unfamiliarity with Old English spelling conventions (wicca was presumably  < *wikjā ); in the other cases, the words come from related dialects or languages (skirt from Danish) which differed in the place and degree of palatalization. More recently, the original of question and nature have come to be pronounced  before  in a number of English dialects, and the original  of soldier and procedure have come to be. This effect can also be seen in casual speech in some dialects, where Do you want to go? comes out as, and Did you eat yet? as.

Examples
Palatalization has played a major role in the history of English in addition to the Uralic, Romance, Slavic, Goidelic, Korean, Japanese, Chinese, Twi, Micronesian languages and Indic languages, among many others throughout the world. In pre-Old English, for example (c. 400 AD), palatalization produced new phonemes, and , along with many new cases of. Palatal/non-palatal alternations from this time are still visible in pairs such as speak vs. speech, and less obviously in day vs. dawn. A more recent palatalization (c. 1600 AD) has produced extensive alternations, as in close vs. closure, face  vs. facial , -ate  vs. -ature , etc.

In Japanese, allophonic palatalization affected the dental plosives and, turning them into alveolo-palatal affricates  and  before. Japanese has only recently regained phonetic and  through borrowed words, and thus this originally allophonic palatalization has become lexical. A similar change has also happened in Polish and Belarusian.

In some Zoque languages, does not palatalize velar consonants while it does turn alveolars into palato-alveolars. In the Nupe language, and  are palatalized both before front vowels and, while velars are only palatalized before front vowels. In Ciluba, palatalizes only a preceding, ,  or. In some variants of Ojibwe velars are palatalized before, while apicals are not. In Indo-Aryan languages, dentals and are palatalized when occurring in clusters before  while velars are not.

Synchronic palatalization
Palatalization may be a synchronic phonological process, i.e., some phonemes have palatalized allophones in certain contexts, typically before front vowels, and unpalatalized allophones elsewhere. Because it is allophonic, it often goes unnoticed by native speakers. As an example, compare the of English key with that of coo, or tea with took. The consonant in the first word of each pair is palatalized, but few English speakers would perceive them as distinct.

The process gets complicated when other phonological and morphological processes that delete the palatalizing sound, such as syncope or elision, make the surface realization appear to be a phonemic contrast when analysis of the deep structure shows it to be allophonic. For example, Romanian consonants are palatalized before. Palatalized consonants also appear terminally as the manifestation of certain morphological markers, particularly to indicate plurality in nouns and adjectives and the second person singular in verbs. On the surface, it would appear then that ban ('coin') forms a minimal pair with bani  The interpretation commonly taken, however, is that an underlying morpheme |-| palatalizes the consonant and is subsequently deleted.

Palatalization may also occur as a morphological process. For example, although Russian makes phonemic contrasts between palatalized and unpalatalized consonants, alternations across morpheme boundaries are normal:
 * ответ ('answer') vs. ответить  ('to answer')
 * несу ('I carry') vs. несёт  ('carries')
 * голод ('hunger') vs. голоден  ('hungry' masc.)

Local uses of the word
There are various other local or historical uses of the word. In Slavic linguistics, the "palatal" fricatives marked by a háček are really postalveolar consonants that arose from palatalization historically. There are also phonetically palatalized consonants (marked with an acute accent) that contrast with this; thus the distinction is made between "palatal" (postalveolar) and "palatalized". Such "palatalized" consonants are not always phonetically palatalized; e.g., in Russian, when undergoes palatalization, a palatalized sibilant offglide appears, as in тема.

In Uralic linguistics, "palatalization" has the standard phonetic meaning. ,, , , , are distinct phonemes, as they are in the Slavic languages, but  and  are not considered either palatal or palatalized sounds. Also, the Uralic palatalized is a stop with no frication, unlike in Russian.

In using the Latin alphabet for Uralic languages, palatalization is typically denoted with an acute accent, as in Võro ⟨ś⟩; an apostrophe, as in Karelian ⟨s’⟩; or digraphs in j, as in the Savo dialect of Finnish, ⟨sj⟩. Postalveolars, in contrast, take a caron, ⟨š⟩, or are digraphs in ⟨h⟩, ⟨sh⟩.