Palatalization
Encyclopedia
In linguistics
, palatalization (icon), 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 [j] (a palatal approximant
, like the sound of "y" in "yellow"). For example, in the Polish
word kiedy ("when"), the letters ki represent a palatalized [k], indicated in IPA
notation as [kʲ], 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 [j] sound or a front vowel
. For example, in Italian
, before the front vowels e and i, the letter c (which otherwise represents [k], a velar consonant
), has come to be pronounced as the palato-alveolar consonant
[tʃ], 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
.
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 [e] or [ɛ] after a palatalized velar consonant, or in the Uralic
language Erzya
, where the near-open low front unrounded vowel [æ] only occurs as an allophone
of the open vowel [a] after a palatalized consonant, as seen in the pronunciation of the name of the language itself, [erzʲæ]. 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 /a/. However, while the process may be called palatalization, the resulting vowel [æ] 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.
articulation of otherwise apical
consonants such as /t/ and /s/. 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 [pɐˈlʲto], царь [tsarʲ] and Катя [ˈkatʲə]. 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).
, close
(high) front vowels and the semi-vowel [j]; 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:
Early English borrowings from French show the original affricate, as chamber ('[private] room') < Old French chambre < camera; cf French chambre /ʃɑ̃bʁ/ ('room')
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 [x]; this results from a long process where /ɡ/ became palatalized to [ɡʲ], then assibilated to [dʒ], deaffricated to [ʒ], devoiced to [ʃ] 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, /l/ in word-initial clusters with a voiceless obstruent became palatalized, as Latin clamare ('to call') → Italian chiamare /kjamare/ and Old Portuguese chamar; in Spanish, the obstruent drops before the palatalized liquid: llamar /ʎamar/. Differently, in an even larger area, Latin *[kt] became *[kʲt] (or even *[kʲtʲ]), thus from a form like Latin octō ('eight') comes French huit, Spanish ocho, and Portuguese oito /oitu/.
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 [ˈwɪkə] is a spelling pronunciation
based on unfamiliarity with Old English spelling conventions (wicca was presumably [ˈwɪtʃːa] < *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 /t/ of question and nature have come to be pronounced [tʃ] before [j] in a number of English dialects, and the original /d/ of soldier and procedure have come to be [dʒ]. This effect can also be seen in casual speech in some dialects, where Do you want to go? comes out as [dʒuː ˈwʌnə ɡoʊ], and Did you eat yet? as [ˈdɪdʒə ˈiːtʃɛt].
, 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 /tʃ/, /dʒ/ and /ʃ/, along with many new cases of /j/. 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 /z/ vs. closure /ʒ/, face /s/ vs. facial /ʃ/, -ate /t/ vs. -ature /tʃ/, etc.
In Japanese
, allophonic palatalization affected the dental plosives /t/ and /d/, turning them into alveolo-palatal
affricates [tɕ] and [dʑ] before [i]. Japanese has only recently regained phonetic [ti] and [di] 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
, [j] does not palatalize velar consonants while it does turn alveolars into palato-alveolars. In the Nupe language
, /s/ and /z/ are palatalized both before front vowels and /j/, while velars are only palatalized before front vowels. In Ciluba, /j/ palatalizes only a preceding /t/, /s/, /l/ or /n/. In some variants of Ojibwe
velars are palatalized before /j/, while apicals are not. In Indo-Aryan languages
, dentals and /r/ are palatalized when occurring in clusters before /j/ while velars are not.
phonological
process, i.e., some phoneme
s have palatalized allophone
s 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 /k/ of English key with that of 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 /i/. 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 [ban] ('coin') forms a minimal pair
with bani [banʲ] The interpretation commonly taken, however, is that an underlying morpheme |-i| 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:
s 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 /t/ undergoes palatalization, a palatalized sibilant offglide appears, as in тема [ˈtˢʲɛmə].
In Uralic
linguistics, "palatalization" has the standard phonetic meaning. /s/, /sʲ/, /ʃ/, /t/, /tʲ/, /tʃ/ are distinct phonemes, as they are in the Slavic languages, but /ʃ/ and /tʃ/ are not considered either palatal or palatalized sounds. Also, the Uralic palatalized /tʲ/ 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
⟩.
Linguistics
Linguistics is the scientific study of human language. Linguistics can be broadly broken into three categories or subfields of study: language form, language meaning, and language in context....
, palatalization (icon), also palatization, may refer to two different processes by which a sound, usually a consonant
Consonant
In articulatory phonetics, a consonant is a speech sound that is articulated with complete or partial closure of the vocal tract. Examples are , pronounced with the lips; , pronounced with the front of the tongue; , pronounced with the back of the tongue; , pronounced in the throat; and ,...
, comes to be produced with the tongue in a position in the mouth near the palate
Palate
The palate is the roof of the mouth in humans and other mammals. It separates the oral cavity from the nasal cavity. A similar structure is found in crocodilians, but, in most other tetrapods, the oral and nasal cavities are not truly separate. The palate is divided into two parts, the anterior...
.
In describing the phonetics
Phonetics
Phonetics is a branch of linguistics that comprises the study of the sounds of human speech, or—in the case of sign languages—the equivalent aspects of sign. It is concerned with the physical properties of speech sounds or signs : their physiological production, acoustic properties, auditory...
of an existing language (i.e., in synchronic
Synchronic
Synchronic may refer to:*Synchronicity*Synchronic analysis, in linguistics * Synchronic, an adjective referring to a quality of music....
descriptions), a palatalized consonant is one pronounced with a palatal secondary articulation
Secondary articulation
Secondary articulation refers to co-articulated consonants where the two articulations are not of the same manner. The approximant-like secondary articulation is weaker than the primary, and colors it rather than obscuring it...
. This means that the consonant is pronounced as if followed very closely by the sound [j] (a palatal approximant
Palatal approximant
The palatal approximant is a type of consonantal sound used in many spoken languages. The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents this sound is '...
, like the sound of "y" in "yellow"). For example, in the Polish
Polish language
Polish is a language of the Lechitic subgroup of West Slavic languages, used throughout Poland and by Polish minorities in other countries...
word kiedy ("when"), the letters ki represent a palatalized [k], indicated in IPA
International Phonetic Alphabet
The International Phonetic Alphabet "The acronym 'IPA' strictly refers [...] to the 'International Phonetic Association'. But it is now such a common practice to use the acronym also to refer to the alphabet itself that resistance seems pedantic...
notation as [kʲ], 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
Historical linguistics
Historical linguistics is the study of language change. It has five main concerns:* to describe and account for observed changes in particular languages...
, and refers to a sound change
Sound change
Sound change includes any processes of language change that affect pronunciation or sound system structures...
in which a consonant's place of articulation
Place of articulation
In articulatory phonetics, the place of articulation of a consonant is the point of contact where an obstruction occurs in the vocal tract between an articulatory gesture, an active articulator , and a passive location...
becomes closer to the palatal
Palatal consonant
Palatal consonants are consonants articulated with the body of the tongue raised against the hard palate...
position. This change is often triggered by a following [j] sound or a front vowel
Front vowel
A front vowel is a type of vowel sound used in some spoken languages. The defining characteristic of a front vowel is that the tongue is positioned as far in front as possible in the mouth without creating a constriction that would be classified as a consonant. Front vowels are sometimes also...
. For example, in Italian
Italian language
Italian is a Romance language spoken mainly in Europe: Italy, Switzerland, San Marino, Vatican City, by minorities in Malta, Monaco, Croatia, Slovenia, France, Libya, Eritrea, and Somalia, and by immigrant communities in the Americas and Australia...
, before the front vowels e and i, the letter c (which otherwise represents [k], a velar consonant
Velar consonant
Velars are consonants articulated with the back part of the tongue against the soft palate, the back part of the roof of the mouth, known also as the velum)....
), has come to be pronounced as the palato-alveolar consonant
Palato-alveolar consonant
In phonetics, palato-alveolar consonants are postalveolar consonants, nearly always sibilants, that are weakly palatalized with a domed tongue...
[tʃ], 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
Slavic languages
The Slavic languages , a group of closely related languages of the Slavic peoples and a subgroup of Indo-European languages, have speakers in most of Eastern Europe, in much of the Balkans, in parts of Central Europe, and in the northern part of Asia.-Branches:Scholars traditionally divide Slavic...
, 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
Vowel
In phonetics, a vowel is a sound in spoken language, such as English ah! or oh! , pronounced with an open vocal tract so that there is no build-up of air pressure at any point above the glottis. This contrasts with consonants, such as English sh! , where there is a constriction or closure at some...
that has become fronter
Front vowel
A front vowel is a type of vowel sound used in some spoken languages. The defining characteristic of a front vowel is that the tongue is positioned as far in front as possible in the mouth without creating a constriction that would be classified as a consonant. Front vowels are sometimes also...
or closer
Close vowel
A close vowel is a type of vowel sound used in many spoken languages. The defining characteristic of a close vowel is that the tongue is positioned as close as possible to the roof of the mouth without creating a constriction that would be classified as a consonant.This term is prescribed by the...
.
Types
In technical terms, palatalization refers to one of several things:- A phoneticPhoneticsPhonetics is a branch of linguistics that comprises the study of the sounds of human speech, or—in the case of sign languages—the equivalent aspects of sign. It is concerned with the physical properties of speech sounds or signs : their physiological production, acoustic properties, auditory...
term of the secondary articulationSecondary articulationSecondary articulation refers to co-articulated consonants where the two articulations are not of the same manner. The approximant-like secondary articulation is weaker than the primary, and colors it rather than obscuring it...
of consonantConsonantIn articulatory phonetics, a consonant is a speech sound that is articulated with complete or partial closure of the vocal tract. Examples are , pronounced with the lips; , pronounced with the front of the tongue; , pronounced with the back of the tongue; , pronounced in the throat; and ,...
s by which the body of the tongueTongueThe tongue is a muscular hydrostat on the floors of the mouths of most vertebrates which manipulates food for mastication. It is the primary organ of taste , as much of the upper surface of the tongue is covered in papillae and taste buds. It is sensitive and kept moist by saliva, and is richly...
is raised toward the hard palateHard palateThe hard palate is a thin horizontal bony plate of the skull, located in the roof of the mouth. It spans the arch formed by the upper teeth.It is formed by the palatine process of the maxilla and horizontal plate of palatine bone....
and the alveolar ridgeAlveolar ridgeAn alveolar ridge is one of the two jaw ridges either on the roof of the mouth between the upper teeth and the hard palate or on the bottom of the mouth behind the lower teeth. The alveolar ridges contain the sockets of the teeth....
during the articulation of the consonant. Such consonants are phonetically palatalized, and in the International Phonetic AlphabetInternational Phonetic AlphabetThe International Phonetic Alphabet "The acronym 'IPA' strictly refers [...] to the 'International Phonetic Association'. But it is now such a common practice to use the acronym also to refer to the alphabet itself that resistance seems pedantic...
they are indicated by a superscript ⟨j⟩, as with [tʲ] for a palatalized [t].Prior to 1989, several palatalized consonants were represented by curly-tailed variants in the IPA, e.g., [ʆ] for [ʃʲ] and [ʓ] for [ʒʲ]. See also Palatal hookPalatal hookThe palatal hook is a type of hook diacritic formerly used in the International Phonetic Alphabet to represent palatalized consonants. It is a small, leftwards-facing hook joined to the bottom-right side of a letter, and is distinguished from various other hooks indicating retroflexion, etc.The...
.
- A common assimilatoryAssimilation (linguistics)Assimilation is a common phonological process by which the sound of the ending of one word blends into the sound of the beginning of the following word. This occurs when the parts of the mouth and vocal cords start to form the beginning sounds of the next word before the last sound has been...
process or the result of such a process, which involves front vowelFront vowelA front vowel is a type of vowel sound used in some spoken languages. The defining characteristic of a front vowel is that the tongue is positioned as far in front as possible in the mouth without creating a constriction that would be classified as a consonant. Front vowels are sometimes also...
s (that is, sounds with a higher second formantFormantFormants are defined by Gunnar Fant as 'the spectral peaks of the sound spectrum |P|' of the voice. In speech science and phonetics, formant is also used to mean an acoustic resonance of the human vocal tract...
such as [i] and [e]) and/or the palatal approximantPalatal approximantThe palatal approximant is a type of consonantal sound used in many spoken languages. The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents this sound is '...
[j] causing nearby phones to shift towards (though not necessarily coming to) the palatalPalatal consonantPalatal consonants are consonants articulated with the body of the tongue raised against the hard palate...
articulatory positionPlace of articulationIn articulatory phonetics, the place of articulation of a consonant is the point of contact where an obstruction occurs in the vocal tract between an articulatory gesture, an active articulator , and a passive location...
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
Palatal consonant
Palatal consonants are consonants articulated with the body of the tongue raised against the hard palate...
or palatalized consonant exerts on nearby sounds, as in the history of Old French
Old French
Old French was the Romance dialect continuum spoken in territories that span roughly the northern half of modern France and parts of modern Belgium and Switzerland from the 9th century to the 14th century...
where Bartsch's law turned low vowels into [e] or [ɛ] after a palatalized velar consonant, or in the Uralic
Uralic languages
The Uralic languages constitute a language family of some three dozen languages spoken by approximately 25 million people. The healthiest Uralic languages in terms of the number of native speakers are Hungarian, Finnish, Estonian, Mari and Udmurt...
language Erzya
Erzya language
The Erzya language is spoken by about 500,000 people in the northern and eastern and north-western parts of the Republic of Mordovia and adjacent regions of Nizhniy Novgorod, Chuvashia, Penza, Samara, Saratov, Orenburg, Ulyanovsk, Tatarstan and Bashkortostan in Russia...
, where the near-open low front unrounded vowel [æ] only occurs as an allophone
Allophone
In phonology, an allophone is one of a set of multiple possible spoken sounds used to pronounce a single phoneme. For example, and are allophones for the phoneme in the English language...
of the open vowel [a] after a palatalized consonant, as seen in the pronunciation of the name of the language itself, [erzʲæ]. 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 /a/. However, while the process may be called palatalization, the resulting vowel [æ] 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 ⟨ʲ⟩ 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 laminalLaminal consonant
A laminal consonant is a phone produced by obstructing the air passage with the blade of the tongue, which is the flat top front surface just behind the tip of the tongue on the top. This contrasts with apical consonants, which are produced by creating an obstruction with the tongue apex only...
articulation of otherwise apical
Apical consonant
An apical consonant is a phone produced by obstructing the air passage with the apex of the tongue . This contrasts with laminal consonants, which are produced by creating an obstruction with the blade of the tongue .This is not a very common distinction, and typically applied only to fricatives...
consonants such as /t/ and /s/. It is a phonemic feature in some languages; a common misconception is that it is merely allophonic
Allophone
In phonology, an allophone is one of a set of multiple possible spoken sounds used to pronounce a single phoneme. For example, and are allophones for the phoneme in the English language...
, like in English. Phonemic palatalization may be contrasted with either plain or velarized articulation. In Finnic languages
Finnic languages
The term Finnic languages often means the Baltic-Finnic languages, an undisputed branch of the Uralic languages. However, it is also commonly used to mean the Finno-Permic languages, a hypothetical intermediate branch that includes Baltic Finnic, or the more disputed Finno-Volgaic languages....
, Baltic
Baltic languages
The Baltic languages are a group of related languages belonging to the Balto-Slavic branch of the Indo-European language family and spoken mainly in areas extending east and southeast of the Baltic Sea in Northern Europe...
languages and Slavic languages
Slavic languages
The Slavic languages , a group of closely related languages of the Slavic peoples and a subgroup of Indo-European languages, have speakers in most of Eastern Europe, in much of the Balkans, in parts of Central Europe, and in the northern part of Asia.-Branches:Scholars traditionally divide Slavic...
, the contrast is with plain consonants, but in Irish
Irish language
Irish , also known as Irish Gaelic, is a Goidelic language of the Indo-European language family, originating in Ireland and historically spoken by the Irish people. Irish is now spoken as a first language by a minority of Irish people, as well as being a second language of a larger proportion of...
, it is with velarized
Velarization
Velarization is a secondary articulation of consonants by which the back of the tongue is raised toward the velum during the articulation of the consonant.In the International Phonetic Alphabet, velarization is transcribed by one of three diacritics:...
consonants.
Phonetically palatalized consonants may vary in their exact realization. Some, but not all languages add offglides or onglides. In Russian
Russian language
Russian is a Slavic language used primarily in Russia, Belarus, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan. It is an unofficial but widely spoken language in Ukraine, Moldova, Latvia, Turkmenistan and Estonia and, to a lesser extent, the other countries that were once constituent republics...
, both plain and palatalized consonant phonemes are found in words like пальто [pɐˈlʲto], царь [tsarʲ] and Катя [ˈkatʲə]. Typically, the vowel (especially a non-front vowel) following a palatalized consonant has a palatal offglide. In Hupa
Hupa language
-External links :* * overview at the Survey of California and Other Indian Languages*...
, 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
Skolt Sami
Skolt Sami is a Uralic, Sami language spoken by approximately 400 speakers in Finland, mainly in Sevettijärvi, and approximately 20–30 speakers of the Njuõˊttjäuˊrr dialect in an area surrounding Lake Lovozero in Russia. Skolt Sami used to also be spoken on the Neiden area of Norway,...
, a language which is unusual in contrasting suprasegmental palatalization with segmental palatalization (i.e., inherently palatalized consonants).
Mechanism
Palatalization is usually triggered only by midMid vowel
A mid vowel is a vowel sound used in some spoken languages. The defining characteristic of a mid vowel is that the tongue is positioned mid-way between an open vowel and a close vowel...
, close
Close vowel
A close vowel is a type of vowel sound used in many spoken languages. The defining characteristic of a close vowel is that the tongue is positioned as close as possible to the roof of the mouth without creating a constriction that would be classified as a consonant.This term is prescribed by the...
(high) front vowels and the semi-vowel [j]; 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
Apical consonant
An apical consonant is a phone produced by obstructing the air passage with the apex of the tongue . This contrasts with laminal consonants, which are produced by creating an obstruction with the blade of the tongue .This is not a very common distinction, and typically applied only to fricatives...
and coronal
Coronal consonant
Coronal consonants are consonants articulated with the flexible front part of the tongue. Only the coronal consonants can be divided into apical , laminal , domed , or subapical , as well as a few rarer orientations, because only the front of the tongue has such...
consonants. On the other hand, most of the palatalized consonants also undergo spirantization, except for the palatalized labials.
In Gallo-Romance, Vulgar Latin
Vulgar Latin
Vulgar Latin is any of the nonstandard forms of Latin from which the Romance languages developed. Because of its nonstandard nature, it had no official orthography. All written works used Classical Latin, with very few exceptions...
} became } very early, with the subsequent deaffrication and some further developments of the vowel. For instance:
- *cattus ('cat') → chat /ʃa/
- calvus ('bald') → chauve /ʃov/
- *blanca ('white' fem.) → blanche /blɑ̃ʃ/
- catena ('chain') → chaine /ʃɛn/
- carus ('dear') → cher /ʃɛʁ/
Early English borrowings from French show the original affricate, as chamber ('[private] room') < Old French chambre < camera; cf French chambre /ʃɑ̃bʁ/ ('room')
Historical (diachronic) palatalization
Palatalization may result in a phonemic split, that is, a historical changeHistorical linguistics
Historical linguistics is the study of language change. It has five main concerns:* to describe and account for observed changes in particular languages...
by which a phoneme
Phoneme
In a language or dialect, a phoneme is the smallest segmental unit of sound employed to form meaningful contrasts between utterances....
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
Lenition
In linguistics, lenition is a kind of sound change that alters consonants, making them "weaker" in some way. The word lenition itself means "softening" or "weakening" . Lenition can happen both synchronically and diachronically...
tendency of palatalized consonants (by assibilation
Assibilation
In linguistics, assibilation is the term for a sound change resulting in a sibilant consonant. It is commonly the final phase of palatalization.-Romance languages:...
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
Votic language
Votic or Votian is the language spoken by the Votes of Ingria. It is closely related to Estonian and belongs to the Finnic subgroup of Uralic languages. Votic is spoken only in Krakolye and Luzhitsy, two villages in the Kingisepp district, and is close to extinction...
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
Spanish language
Spanish , also known as Castilian , is a Romance language in the Ibero-Romance group that evolved from several languages and dialects in central-northern Iberia around the 9th century and gradually spread with the expansion of the Kingdom of Castile into central and southern Iberia during the...
, where palatalized ('soft'
Hard and soft G
In the Latin-based orthographies of many European languages , a distinction between hard and soft ⟨g⟩ occurs in which ⟨g⟩ represents two distinct phonemes...
) g has ended up as [x]; this results from a long process where /ɡ/ became palatalized to [ɡʲ], then assibilated to [dʒ], deaffricated to [ʒ], devoiced to [ʃ] shifted back to the velar
Velar consonant
Velars are consonants articulated with the back part of the tongue against the soft palate, the back part of the roof of the mouth, known also as the velum)....
place of articulation (See History of Spanish and ceceo
Ceceo
In Spanish dialectology, the terms distinción, seseo and ceceo are used to describe the opposition between dialects that distinguish the phonemes and , and those that exhibit merger of the two sounds into either or .Dialects that distinguish the two sounds, and thus pronounce the words casa...
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, /l/ in word-initial clusters with a voiceless obstruent became palatalized, as Latin clamare ('to call') → Italian chiamare /kjamare/ and Old Portuguese chamar; in Spanish, the obstruent drops before the palatalized liquid: llamar /ʎamar/. Differently, in an even larger area, Latin *[kt] became *[kʲt] (or even *[kʲtʲ]), thus from a form like Latin octō ('eight') comes French huit, Spanish ocho, and Portuguese oito /oitu/.
Such phonemic splits due to historic palatalization are common in many other languages. Some English
English language
English is a West Germanic language that arose in the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of England and spread into what was to become south-east Scotland under the influence of the Anglian medieval kingdom of Northumbria...
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 [ˈwɪkə] is a spelling pronunciation
Spelling pronunciation
A spelling pronunciation is a pronunciation that, instead of reflecting the way the word was pronounced by previous generations of speakers, is a rendering in sound of the word's spelling.-Examples of English words with common spelling pronunciations:...
based on unfamiliarity with Old English spelling conventions (wicca was presumably [ˈwɪtʃːa] < *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 /t/ of question and nature have come to be pronounced [tʃ] before [j] in a number of English dialects, and the original /d/ of soldier and procedure have come to be [dʒ]. This effect can also be seen in casual speech in some dialects, where Do you want to go? comes out as [dʒuː ˈwʌnə ɡoʊ], and Did you eat yet? as [ˈdɪdʒə ˈiːtʃɛt].
Examples
Palatalization has played a major role in the history of English in addition to the UralicUralic languages
The Uralic languages constitute a language family of some three dozen languages spoken by approximately 25 million people. The healthiest Uralic languages in terms of the number of native speakers are Hungarian, Finnish, Estonian, Mari and Udmurt...
, Romance
Romance languages
The Romance languages are a branch of the Indo-European language family, more precisely of the Italic languages subfamily, comprising all the languages that descend from Vulgar Latin, the language of ancient Rome...
, Slavic
Slavic languages
The Slavic languages , a group of closely related languages of the Slavic peoples and a subgroup of Indo-European languages, have speakers in most of Eastern Europe, in much of the Balkans, in parts of Central Europe, and in the northern part of Asia.-Branches:Scholars traditionally divide Slavic...
, Goidelic
Goidelic languages
The Goidelic languages or Gaelic languages are one of the two branches of the Insular Celtic languages, the other consisting of the Brythonic languages. Goidelic languages historically formed a dialect continuum stretching from the south of Ireland through the Isle of Man to the north of Scotland...
, Korean
Korean language
Korean is the official language of the country Korea, in both South and North. It is also one of the two official languages in the Yanbian Korean Autonomous Prefecture in People's Republic of China. There are about 78 million Korean speakers worldwide. In the 15th century, a national writing...
, Japanese
Japanese language
is a language spoken by over 130 million people in Japan and in Japanese emigrant communities. It is a member of the Japonic language family, which has a number of proposed relationships with other languages, none of which has gained wide acceptance among historical linguists .Japanese is an...
, Chinese
Chinese language
The Chinese language is a language or language family consisting of varieties which are mutually intelligible to varying degrees. Originally the indigenous languages spoken by the Han Chinese in China, it forms one of the branches of Sino-Tibetan family of languages...
, Twi
Twi
Asante, or Ashanti, is one of three literary dialects of the Akan language of southern Ghana, and the prestige dialect of that language. It is spoken in and around Kumasi, the capital of the former Ashanti Empire and current subnational Asante Kingdom within Ghana.Along with the Akuapem dialect,...
, Micronesian languages
Micronesian languages
The family of Micronesian languages is a branch of the Oceanic languages. It consists of twenty languages, the nineteen Micronesian Proper languages and Nauruan...
and Indic languages, among many others throughout the world. In pre-Old English, for example (c. 400 AD), palatalization produced new phonemes /tʃ/, /dʒ/ and /ʃ/, along with many new cases of /j/. 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 /z/ vs. closure /ʒ/, face /s/ vs. facial /ʃ/, -ate /t/ vs. -ature /tʃ/, etc.
In Japanese
Japanese language
is a language spoken by over 130 million people in Japan and in Japanese emigrant communities. It is a member of the Japonic language family, which has a number of proposed relationships with other languages, none of which has gained wide acceptance among historical linguists .Japanese is an...
, allophonic palatalization affected the dental plosives /t/ and /d/, turning them into alveolo-palatal
Alveolo-palatal consonant
In phonetics, alveolo-palatal consonants are palatalized postalveolar sounds, usually fricatives and affricates, articulated with the blade of the tongue behind the alveolar ridge, and the body of the tongue raised toward the palate...
affricates [tɕ] and [dʑ] before [i]. Japanese has only recently regained phonetic [ti] and [di] through borrowed words, and thus this originally allophonic palatalization has become lexical. A similar change has also happened in Polish
Polish language
Polish is a language of the Lechitic subgroup of West Slavic languages, used throughout Poland and by Polish minorities in other countries...
and Belarusian
Belarusian language
The Belarusian language , sometimes referred to as White Russian or White Ruthenian, is the language of the Belarusian people...
.
In some Zoque languages
Zoque languages
The Zoque languages are languages of the Zoquean branch of the Mixe–Zoquean language family indigenous to southern Mexico.The Zoque languages are spoken in the in northern Chiapas and far eastern Chiapas around Chimalapa, and in Ayapa Tabasco altogether by around 88,000 indigenous Zoque people...
, [j] does not palatalize velar consonants while it does turn alveolars into palato-alveolars. In the Nupe language
Nupe language
The Nupe language is spoken primarily by the Nupe people of the Middle Belt region of Nigeria; its geographical distribution is limited to the west-central portion of this region and maintains pre-eminence in Niger State.-External links:*** Portions of the Book of Common Prayer in Nupe....
, /s/ and /z/ are palatalized both before front vowels and /j/, while velars are only palatalized before front vowels. In Ciluba, /j/ palatalizes only a preceding /t/, /s/, /l/ or /n/. In some variants of Ojibwe
Ojibwe language
Ojibwe , also called Anishinaabemowin, is an indigenous language of the Algonquian language family. Ojibwe is characterized by a series of dialects that have local names and frequently local writing systems...
velars are palatalized before /j/, while apicals are not. In Indo-Aryan languages
Indo-Aryan languages
The Indo-Aryan languages constitutes a branch of the Indo-Iranian languages, itself a branch of the Indo-European language family...
, dentals and /r/ are palatalized when occurring in clusters before /j/ while velars are not.
Synchronic palatalization
Palatalization may be a synchronicSynchronic analysis
In linguistics, a synchronic analysis is one that views linguistic phenomena only at one point in time, usually the present, though a synchronic analysis of a historical language form is also possible. This may be distinguished from diachronics, which regards a phenomenon in terms of developments...
phonological
Phonology
Phonology is, broadly speaking, the subdiscipline of linguistics concerned with the sounds of language. That is, it is the systematic use of sound to encode meaning in any spoken human language, or the field of linguistics studying this use...
process, i.e., some phoneme
Phoneme
In a language or dialect, a phoneme is the smallest segmental unit of sound employed to form meaningful contrasts between utterances....
s have palatalized allophone
Allophone
In phonology, an allophone is one of a set of multiple possible spoken sounds used to pronounce a single phoneme. For example, and are allophones for the phoneme in the English language...
s 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 /k/ of English key with that of 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
Elision
Elision is the omission of one or more sounds in a word or phrase, producing a result that is easier for the speaker to pronounce...
, make the surface realization appear to be a phonemic contrast when analysis of the deep structure
Deep structure
In linguistics, specifically in the study of syntax in the tradition of generative grammar , the deep structure of a linguistic expression is a theoretical construct that seeks to unify several related structures. For example, the sentences "Pat loves Chris" and "Chris is loved by Pat" mean...
shows it to be allophonic. For example, Romanian
Romanian language
Romanian Romanian Romanian (or Daco-Romanian; obsolete spellings Rumanian, Roumanian; self-designation: română, limba română ("the Romanian language") or românește (lit. "in Romanian") is a Romance language spoken by around 24 to 28 million people, primarily in Romania and Moldova...
consonants are palatalized before /i/. 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 [ban] ('coin') forms a minimal pair
Minimal pair
In phonology, minimal pairs are pairs of words or phrases in a particular language, which differ in only one phonological element, such as a phone, phoneme, toneme or chroneme and have distinct meanings...
with bani [banʲ] The interpretation commonly taken, however, is that an underlying morpheme |-i| palatalizes the consonant and is subsequently deleted.
Palatalization may also occur as a morphological
Morphology (linguistics)
In linguistics, morphology is the identification, analysis and description, in a language, of the structure of morphemes and other linguistic units, such as words, affixes, parts of speech, intonation/stress, or implied context...
process. For example, although Russian makes phonemic contrasts between palatalized and unpalatalized consonants, alternations across morpheme boundaries are normal:
- ответ [ɐˈtvʲɛt] ('answer') vs. ответить [ɐˈtvʲetʲɪtʲ] ('to answer')
- несу [nʲɪˈsu] ('I carry') vs. несёт [nʲɪˈsʲot] ('carries')
- голод [ˈɡolət] ('hunger') vs. голоден [ˈɡolədʲɪn] ('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 consonantPostalveolar consonant
Postalveolar consonants are consonants articulated with the tongue near or touching the back of the alveolar ridge, further back in the mouth than the alveolar consonants, which are at the ridge itself, but not as far back as the hard palate...
s that arose from palatalization historically. There are also phonetically palatalized consonants (marked with an acute accent
Acute accent
The acute accent is a diacritic used in many modern written languages with alphabets based on the Latin, Cyrillic, and Greek scripts.-Apex:An early precursor of the acute accent was the apex, used in Latin inscriptions to mark long vowels.-Greek:...
) 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 /t/ undergoes palatalization, a palatalized sibilant offglide appears, as in тема [ˈtˢʲɛmə].
In Uralic
Uralic languages
The Uralic languages constitute a language family of some three dozen languages spoken by approximately 25 million people. The healthiest Uralic languages in terms of the number of native speakers are Hungarian, Finnish, Estonian, Mari and Udmurt...
linguistics, "palatalization" has the standard phonetic meaning. /s/, /sʲ/, /ʃ/, /t/, /tʲ/, /tʃ/ are distinct phonemes, as they are in the Slavic languages, but /ʃ/ and /tʃ/ are not considered either palatal or palatalized sounds. Also, the Uralic palatalized /tʲ/ 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
Võro
Võro may refer to:* Võro people, an ethnic group of Estonia* Võro language, a language belonging to the Baltic-Finnic branch of the Finno-Ugric languages of Estonia* Võro Institute, the governing organization of the Võro languageVoro may refer to:...
⟨ś
S
S is the nineteenth letter in the ISO basic Latin alphabet.-History: Semitic Šîn represented a voiceless postalveolar fricative . Greek did not have this sound, so the Greek sigma came to represent...
⟩; an apostrophe, as in Karelian
Karelian language
Karelian language is a Finnic language spoken mainly in the Russian Republic of Karelia. Linguistically Karelian is closely related to the Finnish dialects spoken in eastern Finland and some Finnish linguists even classified Karelian as a dialect of Finnish...
⟨s’⟩; or digraphs in j, as in the Savo dialect of Finnish
Finnish language
Finnish is the language spoken by the majority of the population in Finland Primarily for use by restaurant menus and by ethnic Finns outside Finland. It is one of the two official languages of Finland and an official minority language in Sweden. In Sweden, both standard Finnish and Meänkieli, a...
, ⟨sj⟩. Postalveolars, in contrast, take a caron, ⟨š⟩, or are digraphs in ⟨h⟩, ⟨sh
Sh (digraph)
Sh is a digraph of the Latin alphabet, a combination of S and H.-English:In English, sh usually represents . The exception is in compound words, where the s and h are not a digraph, but pronounced separately, e.g. hogshead is hogs-head , not *hog-shead...
⟩.
See also
- IotationIotationIotation is a linguistic phenomenon very characteristic of the Slavic languages. It should not be confused with palatalization, which is an entirely different process....
, a form of palatalization in Slavic languagesSlavic languagesThe Slavic languages , a group of closely related languages of the Slavic peoples and a subgroup of Indo-European languages, have speakers in most of Eastern Europe, in much of the Balkans, in parts of Central Europe, and in the northern part of Asia.-Branches:Scholars traditionally divide Slavic... - Soft signSoft signThe soft sign , also known as yer, is a letter of the Cyrillic script. In Old Church Slavonic, it represented a short front vowel. As with its companion, the back yer, the vowel phoneme it designated was later partly dropped and partly merged with other vowels...
, a Cyrillic alphabetCyrillic alphabetThe Cyrillic script or azbuka is an alphabetic writing system developed in the First Bulgarian Empire during the 10th century AD at the Preslav Literary School...
grapheme indicating palatalization - Manner of articulationManner of articulationIn linguistics, manner of articulation describes how the tongue, lips, jaw, and other speech organs are involved in making a sound. Often the concept is only used for the production of consonants, even though the movement of the articulars will also greatly alter the resonant properties of the...
- List of phonetics topics
- Labio-palatalizationLabio-palatalizationA labio-palatalized sound is one that is simultaneously labialized and palatalized. Typically the roundedness is compressed, like , rather than protruded like . The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet for this secondary articulation is , a superscript , the symbol for the labio-palatal...
- Palatalization in Vulgar Latin
- MouilléMouilleMouillé is a term describing a palatal or palatalized consonant, particularly l or n.-Occurrence:L mouillé has a variety of origins in the Romance languages. In this table, letters that represent or used to represent palatal l are bolded...
External links
- Erkki Savolainen, Internetix 1998. Suomen murteet – Koprinan murretta. (with a sound sample with palatalized t')
- Frisian assibilation as a hypercorrect effect due to a substrate language