Perspectives on palatalization

Abstract

In this article we provide a discussion of the definition of palatalization as a ­phonological ­phenomenon, its crosslinguistic variation, phonetic or functional grounding and phonetic (un)naturalness of palatalization, and theoretical approaches to palatalization patterns. After ­providing this background to the collection of articles in this special issue of Glossa we will give an overview of the contributions collected here.

Keywords

• Phonology
• palatalization
• typology