PALATAL

Palatals are produced by the front of the tongue, which moves up towards the hard palate. We have so far encountered two palatal sounds: the approximant /j/ in yes, and the voiceless palatal stop [c] in kitchen. Recall, however, that [c] is the allophone of /k/ found before certain vowels; velar [k] appears elsewhere. There is a similar pattern for /g/, which has as allophones velar[g] in garden and palatalgive. Since we are constructing a phoneme system here, these allophones are not included in the list.