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How does palatalization change the pronunciation of a consonant?

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Diagram of a human head in profile showing the location of vocal organs and possible places of articulation for speech sounds, with labels for lips, teeth, tongue, palate, uvula, pharynx, and vocal cords, and numbered regions corresponding to types of articulation such as bilabial, alveolar, and velar.
phonetics Diagram depicting the location of human vocal organs and possible places of articulation used for speech.

In phonetics, palatalization changes the pronunciation of a consonant by drawing the blade or front of the tongue up toward the hard palate, which is farther forward than its position during normal articulation.1

This process modifies the sound in two primary ways:

  • Secondary Articulation: The consonant is produced with an added "palatal" quality. For example, in Russian, palatalized consonants are pronounced as if the speaker is attempting to produce the consonant and a y sound simultaneously.12
  • Sound Change: Over time, a nonpalatal consonant may shift entirely into a palatal or palato-alveolar consonant. A common example is the evolution of the Latin k sound into the ch or sh sounds found in many Romance languages, such as the development of the French word chaîne from the Latin catena.13

This shift often occurs when a consonant is influenced by a following front vowel or a front consonant, causing the point of articulation to move forward in the mouth.3