Palatalization (phonetics)

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.