Palatalization (sound change)


Palatalization is a historical-linguistic sound change that results in a palatalized articulation of a consonant or, in certain cases, a front vowel. Palatalization involves change in the place or manner of articulation of consonants, or the fronting or raising of vowels. In some cases, palatalization involves assimilation or lenition.

Types

Palatalization is sometimes an example of assimilation. In some cases, it is triggered by a palatal or palatalized consonant or front vowel, but in other cases, it is not conditioned in any way.

Consonant

Palatalization changes place of articulation or manner of articulation of consonants. It may add palatal secondary articulation or change primary articulation from velar to palatal or alveolar, alveolar to postalveolar.
It may also cause a consonant to change its manner of articulation from stop to affricate or fricative. The change in the manner of articulation is a form of lenition. However, the lenition is frequently accompanied by a change in place of articulation.
  • >,,,,,
Palatalization of velar consonants commonly causes them to front, and apical and coronal consonants are usually raised. In the process, stop consonants are often spirantised except for palatalized labials.
Palatalization, as a sound change, is usually triggered only by mid and close front vowels and the semivowel. The sound that results from palatalization may vary from language to language. For example, palatalization of may produce, etc. A change from to may pass through as an intermediate state, but there is no requirement for that to happen.
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, but apicals are not. In Indo-Aryan languages, dentals and are palatalized when occurring in clusters before, but velars are not.

Vowel

Palatalization sometimes refers to vowel shifts, the fronting of a back vowel or raising of a front vowel. The shifts are sometimes triggered by a nearby palatal or palatalized consonant or by a high front vowel. The Germanic umlaut is a famous example.
A similar change is reconstructed in the history of Old French in which Bartsch's law turned open vowels into or after a palatalized velar consonant. If it was true for all open vowels in Old French, it would explain the palatalization of velar plosives before.
In Erzya, a Uralic language, the open vowel is raised to near-open after a palatalized consonant, as in the name of the language,.
In Russian, the back vowels are fronted to central, and the open vowel is raised to near-open, near palatalized consonants. The palatalized consonants also factor in how unstressed vowels are reduced.

Unconditioned

Palatalization is sometimes unconditioned or spontaneous, not triggered by a palatal or palatalized consonant or front vowel.
In southwestern Romance, clusters of a voiceless obstruent with were palatalized once or twice. This first palatalization was unconditioned. It resulted in a cluster with a palatal lateral, a palatal lateral on its own, or a cluster with a palatal approximant. In a second palatalization, the was affricated to or spirantized to.
In the Western Romance languages, Latin was palatalized once or twice. The first palatalization was unconditioned: the was vocalized to or spirantized to. In a second palatalization, the was affricated to :

Allophony and phonemic split

Palatalization may result in a phonemic split, a historical change by which a phoneme becomes two new phonemes over time through 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 is important. According to some analyses, the lenition of the palatalized consonant is still a part of the palatalization process itself.
In Japanese, allophonic palatalization affected the dental plosives and, turning them into alveolo-palatal affricates and before, romanized as ⟨ch⟩ and ⟨j⟩ respectively. Japanese has, however, recently regained phonetic and from loanwords, and the originally-allophonic palatalization has thus become lexical. A similar change has also happened in Polish and Belarusian. That would also be true about most dialects of Brazilian Portuguese but for the strong phonotactical resistance of its native speakers that turn dental plosives into post-alveolar affricates even in loanwords: McDonald's.
For example, Votic has undergone such a change historically, *keeli → tšeeli 'language', but there is currently an additional distinction between palatalized laminal and non-palatalized apical consonants. An extreme example occurs in Spanish, whose palatalized g has ended up as from a long process where Latin became palatalized to and then affricated to , deaffricated to , devoiced to , and finally retracted to a velar, giving ..

Examples

Palatalization has played a major role in the history of English, and of other languages and language groups throughout the world, such as the Slavic languages.

English

Anglo-Frisian

In Anglo-Frisian, the language that gave rise to English and the Frisian languages, the velar stops and the consonant cluster were palatalized in certain cases and became the sounds,,, and. Many words with Anglo-Frisian palatalization survive in Modern English, and the palatalized sounds are typically spelled,,, and in Modern English.
Palatalization only occurred in certain environments, and so it did not apply to all words from the same root. This is the origin of some alternations in cognate words, such as speak and speech, cold and chill, burrow and bury, dawn and day. Here originates from unpalatalized and from unpalatalized.
Some English words with palatalization have unpalatalized doublets from the Northumbrian dialect and from Old Norse, such as shirt and skirt, church and kirk, ditch and dike. German only underwent palatalization of : cheese and Käse ; lie and liegen ; lay and legen ; fish and Fisch.
The pronunciation of wicca as with a hard is a spelling pronunciation, since the actual Old English pronunciation gave rise to witch.

Other

Others include the following:
  • Palatisation of /s/ to /ʃ/ in modern English
In some English-speaking areas, the sound /s/ changed to /ʃ/, like for example in the words Worcestershire and Association.
Various other examples include asphalt, assume.
  • Rhotic palatalization:
  • In Glasgow and some other urban Scottish accents, is given an apico-alveolar articulation, which auditorily gives an impression of a retracted pronunciation similar to.

    Semitic languages

Arabic

Historical
While in most Semitic languages, e.g. Aramaic, Hebrew, Ge'ez the Gimel represents a, Arabic is considered unique among them where the Gimel was palatalized in most dialects to Jīm an affricate or further into a fricative. While there is variation in Modern Arabic varieties, most of them reflect this palatalized pronunciation except in Egyptian Arabic and a number of Yemeni and Omani dialects, where it is pronounced as. It is not well known when this change occurred or if it is connected to the pronunciation of Qāf as a, but in most of the Arabian peninsula which is the homeland of the Arabic language, the represents a and represents a, except in western and southern Yemen and parts of Oman where represents a and represents a, which shows a strong correlation between the palatalization of to and the pronunciation of the as a as shown in the table below:
Modern Arabic dialects
Some modern Arabic varieties developed palatalization of , and , usually when adjacent to front vowel, though these palatalizations also occur in other environments as well. These three palatalizations occur in a variety of dialects, including Iraqi, rural Levantine varieties, a number of Gulf Arabic dialects, such as Kuwaiti, Qatari, Bahraini, and Emarati, as well as others like Najdi, parts of Oman, and various Bedouin dialects across the Arab World. Examples:
  • كلب > Iraqi and Gulf, and traditional Najdi.
  • ديك > rural Palestinian
  • الشارقة > Gulf while other neighboring dialects pronounce it without palatalization.
  • جديد > Gulf
  • قربة > traditional Najdi, although this phenomenon is fading among the younger generations where قربة is pronounced like in most other dialects in Saudi Arabia.
Palatalization occurs in the pronunciation of the second person feminine singular pronoun in those dialects. For instance:
Classical Arabic عَيْنُكِ 'your eye' is pronounced:
  • in Gulf, Iraqi, and rural levantine dialects
  • in traditional Najdi and a number of bedouin dialects.
  • or in some southern dialects in Saudi Arabia and Yemen.
Speakers in these dialects that do not use the palatalization would merge the feminine and masculine suffix pronouns e.g. عينك as opposed to Classical Arabic عَيْنُكَ and عَيْنُكِ and most other modern urban dialects and .

Assyrian Neo-Aramaic

features the palatalization of kaph, taw and gimel, albeit in some dialects only and seldom in the standardized version of the language.
  • In the Upper Tyari dialects, in a stressed syllable is palatalized and replaced with .
  • may be palatalized to among Assyrians who originate from Urmia; Iran; and Nochiya, southeastern Turkey.
  • In Urmian and some Tyari dialects, is palatalized to.