palatalization

Palatalization is a phonetic process in which a sound, most commonly a consonant, is articulated with the tongue body raised toward the hard palate. It often results in a secondary articulation, yielding palatalized consonants such as [tʲ], [sʲ], or related articulations, or, in some contexts, a fronted or palatalized vowel quality due to coarticulation. Palatalization can be phonemic, producing distinct sound categories, or allophonic, arising predictably in certain phonetic environments.

There are two main manifestations. Primary palatalization involves the consonant itself acquiring a palatal quality, usually described with a superscript j in IPA (for example, tʲ or sʲ). Secondary palatalization describes an articulatory gesture toward the palate that accompanies another articulation, often seen as the influence of an adjacent front vowel or a following i-like vowel on the preceding consonant. In many languages, palatalization spreads through a consonant cluster or is triggered by nearby high front vowels.

Typologically, palatalization is especially prominent in Slavic languages, where consonants can be hard or soft (palatalized) and the former are not phonemically identical to the latter. In other families, palatalization occurs as an allophonic process or as a historical change that yields new palatal or palato-alveolar consonants, such as [t͡ɕ] or [d͡ʑ] in Romance or Slavic varieties before front vowels.

Notation and orthography vary. IPA represents palatalized consonants with a superscript [ʲ] (e.g., [tʲ]), while many languages use diacritics, the soft sign, or iotation to mark palatalization in writing. Palatalization plays a key role in phonology, historical linguistics, and orthographic systems across the world.