palatal consonant

Palatal consonants are consonants articulated with the body of the tongue raised against the hard palate (the middle part of the roof of the mouth). Consonants with the tip of the tongue curled back against the palate are called retroflex.

The most common type of palatal consonant is the extremely common approximant j, which ranks as overall, among the ten most common sounds in the world's languages. The nasal ɲ is also common, occurring in around 35 percent of the world's languages^[1], in most of which its equivalent obstruent is not the plosive c, but the affricate tʃ. Only a few languages in northern Eurasia, the Americas and central Africa contrast palatal plosives with postalveolar affricates - the only common ones being Hungarian, Czech, Slovak and Albanian.

Warning: the IPA symbols <c, ɟ> are commonly used, not for palatal stops, but for the palatalized velar stops [kʲ, ɡʲ], or the palatal affricates [c͡ç, ɟ͡ʝ], or the alveolopalatal affricates [t͡ɕ, d͡ʑ], or even the postalveolar affricates [t͡ʃ, d͡ʒ]. This is an old IPA tradition. True palatal stops are relatively uncommon, so it is a good idea to verify the pronunciation whenever you see <c, ɟ> in the transcription of a language.

Consonants with other primary articulations may be palatalised, that is, accompanied by the raising of the tongue surface towards the hard palate. For example, English [ʃ] (spelled sh) has such a palatal component, although its primary articulation involves the tip of the tongue and the upper gum (this type of articulation is called palatoalveolar). The palatal consonants identified by the International Phonetic Alphabet are:

IPA	Description	Example
		Language	Orthography	IPA	Meaning
	palatal nasal	French	agneau	[aɲo]	lamb
	voiceless palatal plosive	Hungarian	hattyú	[hɒcːuː]	swan
	voiced palatal plosive	Margi	ɟaɗí	[ɟaɗí]	hump of a cow
	voiceless palatal fricative	German	nicht	[nɪçt]	not
	voiced palatal fricative	Spanish	yema	[ʝema]	egg yolk
	palatal approximant	English	yes	[jɛs]	yes
	lateral palatal approximant	Italian	gli	[ʎi]	the (masculine plural)
	voiced palatal implosive	Swahili	hujambo	[huʄambo]	hello

Notes

1. ^ Ian Maddieson (with a chapter contributed by Sandra Ferrari Disner); Patterns of sounds; Cambridge University Press, 1984. ISBN 0-521-26536-3

See also

• Place of articulation
• List of phonetics topics

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