In phonetics, palatalization (, ) or palatization is a way of pronouncing a consonant in which part of the tongue is moved close to the hard palate. Consonants pronounced this way are said to be palatalized and are transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet by affixing a superscript j ⟨ʲ⟩ to the base consonant. Palatalization is not phonemic in English, but it is in Slavic languages such as Russian language and Ukrainian, Finnic languages such as Estonian, Karelian, and Võro, and other languages such as Irish language, Marshallese, Kashmiri, and Japanese.
Types
In technical terms, palatalization refers to the secondary articulation of
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. "Pure" palatalization 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 consonant consonants such as and .
Phonetically palatalized consonants may vary in their exact realization. Some languages add before or after the palatalized consonant (onglides or offglides). In such cases, the vowel (especially a non-front vowel) following a palatalized consonant typically has a palatal onglide. In Russian language, both plain and palatalized consonant phonemes are found in words like большой , царь and Катя . In Hupa language, 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,
In a few languages, including Skolt Sami and many of the Central Chadic languages, palatalization is a suprasegmental feature that affects the pronunciation of an entire syllable, and it may cause certain vowels to be pronounced front vowel and consonants to be slightly palatalized. In Skolt Sami and its relatives (Kildin Sami and Ter Sami), suprasegmental palatalization contrasts with segmental palatal articulation (palatal consonants).
Transcription
In the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA), palatalized consonants are marked by the modifier letter , a superscript version of the symbol for the palatal approximant . For instance, represents the palatalized form of the voiceless alveolar stop . Prior to 1989, a subscript diacritic was used in the IPA: , apart from two palatalized fricatives which were written instead with curly-tailed variants, namely for and for . (See
palatal hook.) The Uralic Phonetic Alphabet marks palatalized consonants by an
acute accent, as do some Finnic languages using the Latin alphabet, as in Võro . Others use an apostrophe, as in Karelian ; or digraphs in
j, as in the Savonian dialects of
Finnish language, .
Phonology
Palatalization has varying
phonological significance in different languages. It is
allophonic in English, but
phonemic in others. In English, consonants are palatalized when they occur before front vowels or the palatal approximant (and in a few other cases), but no words are distinguished by palatalization (complementary distribution), whereas in some of the other languages, the difference between palatalized consonants and plain un-palatalized consonants distinguish
es between words, appearing in a contrastive distribution (where one of the two versions, palatalized or not, appears in the same environment as the other).
Allophonic palatalization
In some languages, like Hindustani, palatalization is
allophonic. Some
have palatalized allophones in certain contexts, typically before
and unpalatalized allophones elsewhere. Because it is allophonic, palatalization of this type does not distinguish words and often goes unnoticed by native speakers. Phonetic palatalization occurs in American English. Stops are palatalized before the front vowel and not palatalized in other cases.
Phonemic palatalization
In some languages, palatalization is a distinctive feature that distinguishes two consonant
. This feature occurs in
Russian language,
Irish language, and
Scottish Gaelic, among others.
Phonemic palatalization may be contrasted with either plain or velarization articulation. In many of the Slavic languages, and some of the Baltic languages and Finnic languages, palatalized consonants contrast with plain consonants, but in Irish language they contrast with velarized consonants.
-
Russian "nose" (unpalatalized )
- nʲɵs "(he) carried" (palatalized )
-
Irish "cow" (velarized b)
- "alive" (palatalized b)
Some palatalized phonemes undergo change beyond phonetic palatalization. For instance, the unpalatalized sibilant (Irish , Scottish ) has a palatalized counterpart that is actually postalveolar , not phonetically palatalized , and the velar fricative in both languages has a palatalized counterpart that is actually palatal rather than palatalized velar . These shifts in primary place of articulation are examples of the sound change of palatalization.
Morphophonemic
In some languages, palatalization is used as a
morpheme or part of a morpheme. In some cases, a vowel caused a consonant to become palatalized, and then this vowel was lost by
elision. Here, there appears to be a phonemic contrast when analysis of the
deep structure shows it to be allophonic.
In Romanian, consonants are palatalized before . Palatalized consonants appear at the end of the word, and mark the plural in nouns and adjectives, and the second person singular in verbs.
Palatalization may also occur as a morphological feature. For example, although Russian makes phonemic contrasts between palatalized and unpalatalized consonants, alternations across morpheme boundaries are normal:[See for a fuller list of examples.]
-
ответ ('answer') vs. ответить ('to answer')
-
несу ('I carry') vs. несёт ('carries')
-
голод ('hunger') vs. голоден ('hungry' masc.)
Sound changes
In some languages, allophonic palatalization developed into phonemic palatalization by
phonemic split. In other languages, phonemes that were originally phonetically palatalized changed further: palatal secondary place of articulation developed into changes in manner of articulation or primary place of articulation.
Phonetic palatalization of a consonant sometimes causes surrounding vowels to change by coarticulation or assimilation. In Russian, "soft" (palatalized) consonants are usually followed by vowels that are relatively more front vowel (that is, closer to or ), and vowels following "hard" (unpalatalized) consonants are further back vowel. See for more information.
Examples
Slavic languages
In many
Slavic languages, palatal or palatalized consonants are called
soft, and others are called
hard. Some of them, like Russian, have numerous pairs of palatalized and unpalatalized consonant phonemes.
Russian Cyrillic has pairs of vowel letters that mark whether the consonant preceding them is hard/soft:
/,
/,
/,
/, and
/.
The otherwise silent letter soft sign also indicates that the previous consonant is soft.
Goidelic
Irish language and
Scottish Gaelic have pairs of palatalized (
slender) and unpalatalized (
broad) consonant phonemes. In Irish, most broad consonants are
velarized. In Scottish Gaelic, the only velarized consonants are and ; is sometimes described as velarized as well.
[Bauer, Michael. Blas na Gàidhlig: The Practical Guide to Gaelic Pronunciation. Glasgow: Akerbeltz, 2011.][Nance, C., McLeod, W., O'Rourke, B. and Dunmore, S. (2016), Identity, accent aim, and motivation in second language users: New Scottish Gaelic speakers' use of phonetic variation. J Sociolinguistics, 20: 164–191. ]
Japanese
Yōon are Japanese moras formed with an added sound between the initial consonant and the vowel. For example, 今日 (
kyō, "today") is written きょう , using a small version of よ, while 器用 (
kiyō, "skillful") is written きよう , with a full-sized よ. Historically,
yōon were not distinguished with the smaller kana and had to be determined by context.
Marshallese
In the Marshallese language, each consonant has some type of secondary articulation (palatalization, velarization, or
Labialization). The palatalized consonants are regarded as "light", and the velarized and rounded consonants are regarded as "heavy", with the rounded consonants being both velarized and labialized.
Norwegian
Many Norwegian dialects have phonemic palatalized consonants. In many parts of Northern Norway and many areas of Møre og Romsdal, for example, the words ('hand') and /hɑnʲː/ ('he') are differentiated only by the palatalization of the final consonant. Palatalization is generally realised only on stressed syllables, but speakers of the Sør-Trøndelag dialects will generally palatalize the coda of a determined plural as well: e.g. or, in other areas, ('the dogs'), rather than *. Norwegian dialects utilizing palatalization will generally palatalize , , and .
See also
Bibliography
-
Bynon, Theodora. Historical Linguistics. Cambridge University Press, 1977. (hardback) or (paperback).
-
Crowley, Terry. (1997) An Introduction to Historical Linguistics. 3rd edition. Oxford University Press.
External links
