Palatalization (sound change)


In linguistics, palatalization is a sound change that either results in a palatal or palatalized consonant or a front vowel, or is triggered by one of them. 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.
An example of palatalization in English is one of the possible pronunciations of did you? as rather than

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 some Zoque languages, does not palatalize velar consonants but it turns alveolars into palato-alveolars. 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 :
In many dialects of English, the back vowel is fronted to near-back, central, or front. This vowel shift is unconditioned, happening in all cases, and not triggered by another sound.
A similar change is reconstructed for Ancient Greek. In the Attic dialect before the Classical period, the back vowels were fronted to. During the Koine or Medieval Greek period, they were unrounded to, and they finally merged as short, the pronunciation that they have in Modern Greek.

Anticipatory and progressive

When palatalization is assimilatory or triggered by a consonant or vowel, it is triggered by a following sound or by a preceding sound.

Effects

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 resistancy 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 Romance, Greek, Slavic, Baltic, Finnic, Swedish, Norwegian, Mordvinic, Samoyedic, Iranian, Indo-Aryan, Goidelic, Korean, Japanese, Chinese, Albanian, Arabic, and Micronesian 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 lay, liegen 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.

Yod-coalescence

Later in English, another palatalization called yod-coalescence occurred. Alveolar stops and fricatives were palatalized before the palatal approximant so that the clusters,, and changed into,, and respectively, frequently occurring with clusters that would be considered to span a syllable boundary. Yod-coalescence in stressed syllables, such as in tune and dune, occurs in Australian, Cockney, Estuary English, Hiberno-English, Newfoundland English, South African English, and to a certain extent in New Zealand English and Scottish English. This can lead to additional homophony; for instance, dew and due come to be pronounced the same as Jew.
In certain varieties—such as Australian English, South African English, and New Zealand English— and in stressed syllables can coalesce into and, respectively. In Australian English for example, assume is pronounced by some speakers. Furthermore, some speakers may palatalize the to a when it comes before the cluster /tr/, so words like student and stress would be pronounced and, respectively, with the former pronunciation being less common among North American speakers. According to author Wayne P. Lawrence, "this phonemic change seems to be neither dialectal nor regional."

Other

Others include the following:

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 or Jīm was palatalized to an affricate or a fricative in most dialects from classical times. 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 Palestinian varieties, a number of Gulf Arabic dialects, such as Kuwaiti, Qatari, Bahraini, and Emarati, as well as others in the Arab peninsula like Najdi, the southern dialects of Saudi Arabia, and various Bedouin dialects. Examples:
Palatalization occurs in the pronunciation of the second person feminine singular pronoun in those dialects. For instance :
Classical Arabic عَيْنُكِ is pronounced:
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.
The Romance languages developed from Vulgar Latin, the colloquial form of Latin spoken in the Roman Empire. Various palatalizations occurred during the historical development of the Romance languages. Some groups of the Romance languages underwent more palatalizations than others. One palatalization affected all groups, some palatalizations affected most groups, and one affected only a few groups.

Gallo-Romance

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 " room" < Old French chambre < Vulgar Latin camera; compare French chambre "room".

Mouillé

Mouillé is a term for palatal consonants in the Romance languages. Palatal consonants in the Romance languages developed from or by palatalization.
l mouillén mouillé
Italianglgn
Frenchilgn
Occitanlhnh
Catalanllny
Spanishllñ
Portugueselhnh

L and n mouillé have a variety of origins in the Romance languages. In these tables, letters that represent or used to represent or are bolded. In French, merged with in pronunciation in the 18th century; in many dialects of Spanish, has merged with. Romanian formerly had both and, but both have merged with : vīnea > > Romanian vie "vineyard"; mulierem > > Romanian muiere "woman".
Latinmeliōrem
"better"		coaglāre
"to coagulate"		auricla
"ear"		caballum
"horse"		lunam
"moon"		clavem
"key"
Italianmigliorecagliareorecchiocavallolunachiave
Frenchmeilleurcailleroreillechevalluneclé
Occitanmelhorcalharaurelhacavallunaclau
Catalanmillorquallarorellacavallllunaclau
Spanishmejorcuajarorejacaballolunallave
Portuguesemelhorcoalharorelhacavaloluachave
Romanian—închegaurechecallunăcheie

Latinseniōrem
"older"		cognātum
"related"		annum
"year"		somnum
"sleep"		somnium
"dream"		unglam
"claw"		vīnum
"wine"
Italiansignorecognatoannosonnosognounghiavino
Frenchseigneur—ansommesongeonglevin
Occitansenhorcunhatansòmsòmionglavin
Catalansenyorcunyatanysonsomniunglavi
Spanishseñorcuñadoañosueñosueñouñavino
Portuguesesenhorcunhadoanosonosonhounhavinho
Romanian—cumnatansomn—unghievin

Satem languages

In certain Indo-European language groups, the reconstructed "palato-velars" of Proto-Indo-European were palatalized into sibilants. The language groups with and without palatalization are called satem and centum languages, after the characteristic developments of the PIE word for "hundred":
In the Slavic languages, two palatalizations took place. Both affected the Proto-Slavic velars. In the first palatalization, the velars before the front vowels and the palatal approximant changed to. In the second palatalization, the velars changed to c, dz or z, and s or š before the Proto-Slavic diphthongs, which must have been monophthongized to by this time.

Mandarin Chinese

In many dialects of Mandarin Chinese, the alveolar sibilants and the velars were palatalized before the medials and merged in pronunciation, yielding the alveolo-palatal sibilants. Alveolo-palatal consonants occur in modern Standard Chinese and are written as in Pinyin. Postal romanization does not show palatalized consonants, reflecting the dialect of the imperial court during the Qing dynasty. For instance, the name of the capital of China was formerly spelled Peking, but is now spelled ', and Tientsin and Sian were the former spellings of ' and .