In phonetics, palatalization ( , US also ) 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 letter. Palatalization is not phonemic in English, but it is in Slavic languages such as Russian and Bulgarian; Uralic languages such as Estonian, Karelian, Veps, Enets and Mansi; Northwest Caucasian languages such as Abkhaz; and other various languages such as Irish, Lithuanian, Marshallese and Kashmiri.
Types In technical terms, palatalization refers to the secondary articulation of consonants by which the middle (dorsum) of the tongue is raised toward the hard palate during the articulation of the consonant. Such consonants are phonetically palatalized. Palatalization may produce a laminal articulation of otherwise apical consonants, such as [t̺] and [s̺] vs palatalized [t̻ʲ] and [s̻ʲ]. In general, palatalization of non-dorsal consonants involve a secondary closure of the oral cavity, with the dorsum of the tongue approaching the hard palate in addition to the primary articulation elsewhere. This is clearly the case with labial consonants such as [pʲ] and [fʲ]. However, in dorsal consonants such as [kʲ] and [xʲ], the tongue can only make a single closure in those two regions, which generally means that the contact is spread over a broader area, from the soft to hard palates, compared to the narrower contact of non-palatalized [k] and [x]; it's not uncommon therefore to transcribe the palatalized sounds simply as palatal [c] and [ç]. Palatalized coronal consonants such as [t̻ʲ] and [n̻ʲ] are somewhere in between: although there may be two places of articulation, the tongue tends to be quite flattened, and moves as if it were a single articulation. In Russian the blade of the tongue remains on the alveolar ridge while the entire front of the tongue is raised, while in Polish the primary articulation (the blade of the tongue) is shifted back toward the palate: [t̠ʲ], [n̠ʲ]. Phonetically palatalized consonants may vary in their exact realization. Some languages add semivowels 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, both plain and palatalized consonant phonemes are found in words like большой [bɐlʲˈʂoj] , царь [tsarʲ] and Катя [ˈkatʲə] . 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). 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 more front 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 ⟨ʲ⟩, a superscript version of the symbol for the palatal approximant ⟨j⟩. For instance, ⟨tʲ⟩ represents the palatalized form of the voiceless alveolar stop [t]. Prior to 1989, a subscript diacritic was used in the IPA: ⟨ᶀ ᶈ ᶆ ᶂ ᶌ ƫ ᶁ ᶇ ᶊ ᶎ ᶅ 𝼓 ᶉ 𝼖 𝼕 ᶄ ᶃ 𝼔 ᶍ ꞕ⟩, apart from two palatalized fricatives which were written instead with curly-tailed variants, namely ⟨ʆ⟩ for [ʃʲ] and ⟨ʓ⟩ for [ʒʲ]. (See palatal hook.) The Uralic Phonetic Alphabet marks palatalized consonants by an acute accent, as do the orthographies of some Finnic languages using Latin-based alphabets, as in Võro ⟨ś⟩. Other orthographies use an apostrophe, as in Karelian ⟨sʼ⟩, or digraphs with j, as in the Savonian dialects of Finnish, ⟨sj⟩.
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 unpalatalized consonants distinguishes 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 phonemes have palatalized allophones in certain contexts, typically before front vowels 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 /i/ and not palatalized in other cases.
Phonemic palatalization In some languages, palatalization is a distinctive feature that distinguishes two consonant phonemes. This feature occurs in Russian, Irish, and Scottish Gaelic, among others. Phonemic palatalization may be contrasted with either plain or velarized articulation. In many of the Slavic languages, and some of the Baltic and Finnic languages, palatalized consonants contrast with plain consonants, but in Irish they contrast with velarized consonants.
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