The following article is from The Great Soviet Encyclopedia (1979). It might be outdated or ideologically biased.

Palatalization

(also softening of consonants), a secondary articulation that involves raising the middle part of the back of the tongue to the hard palate to modify the basic articulation of consonants. Palatalization may be combined with any basic consonantal articulation except dorsal. Since the position of the tongue in palatalization is similar to its position in forming the vowel [i], palatalized consonants have an [i]-vowel coloring. Acoustically, palatalization involves the creation of pitches of a higher frequency.

Palatalization is widespread in many languages before front vowels, especially [i]. It is very important in Russian, since it serves as a distinctive feature of phonemes, as in luk (“onion”) and liuk (“hatch”).

Mentioned in

References in periodicals archive

It is interesting to observe that Meskank (2001) uses the character f for palatalized r, which was used up to the early 20th century, but it is no longer used in the actual orthography.

Derivational suffixes -ar and -nik in Upper Sorbian

Secondly, the "soft" consonants do not form a phonologically natural class: they include the "phonetically soft" (i.e., palatal or palatalized) consonants ([??], [??], [??], [??], [??], [??], and [j]), the so-called "functionally soft" consonants which were once soft but have become depalatalized ([??], [??], [??], amd [??]), as well as [v] and [l].

The later development of an early-emerging system: the curious case of the Polish genitive *

Though I personally wonder about the IPA symbols selected for the closed and open /e/, and would wish to look more closely at the four palatals/'palatalizeds', Mathiassen is not alone in his views, and his is a careful, objective, and in no way dogmatic, presentation.

A Short Grammar of Latvian

Although the superscript [j] is commonly encountered (especially in older literature) as a diacritic meaning "palatalized," the symbols [c] and [[??]] as allophones of /k/ and /g/ serve the same purpose.

Phonetic transcription--what it doesn't tell us

diphthongs, affricates, palatalized and non-palatalized consonants, accented and non-accented vowels were modeled as distinct phonetic units.

Comparative analysis of adapted foreign language and native Lithuanian speech recognizers for voice user interface

Irish has a persistent phonemic contrast between velarized (so-called "broad") and palatalized (so-called "slender") consonants; in transcription, broad consonants are left unmarked while slender consonants are indicated by the prime (').

Coronals and compounding in Irish *

But as regards Watson's claim concerning the total absence of palatalized [k], i.e.

Karl Luick's Historische Grammatik and medieval English consonant changes

The majority of consonants come to have four variants: plain, palatalized, labialized and labialized palatalized.

Evolution of the non-initial vocalic length contrast across the Finnic varieties of Ingria and adjacent areas

It is not certain if the latter is a true palatal stop or a palatalized velar, but the contrast with plain velars is clear since it goes in two directions, becoming a /*k/ in PKxMt and a /*c/ in PPD.

Brahui and the Zagrosian hypothesis

c) the consonant of the base or [i] is palatalized: i.e.

On the interaction between semantics and phonetic iconicity in evaluative morphology

(39) A phonological process described by Krejnovic (1958:146-149) takes effect here conditioning the occurrence of the palatalized plosive as a result of the interaction between the liquid of the passive suffix and the approximant of the person ending.

Towards a full description of the focus system in Tundra Yukaghir