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1. Introduction Affrication is a process creating what are commonly called affricated stops or affricates. These sounds consist phonetically of a cluster formed by a plosive + homorganic fricative, but behave phonologically as one segment (Jakobson a.o. 1952; Sagey 1986; Rubach 1994; Clements 1999). They frequently arise as allophonic variants of non-affricated stops before high vowels and glides (e.g. [t] > [ts, t∫] / __ [i]/[j], [t] > [ts] / __ [u]/[w] in Korean, Japanese, Danish, Romance [Clements 1999]; and /k/ > [t∫] in Slavic, Arabic), but constitute contrastive phoneme…

1. Introduction This entry stays close to the most common definition of ‘voice’, according to which ‘voice’ corresponds to the component of speech that is mainly attributed to the vibration of the vocal folds. The phoneticians distinguish, in fact, between several modes of vocal fold vibration (or voice quality). For some of them, ‘voice’ is the nonmarked mode considered ‘neutral’ or ‘modal’ (see below, Sec. 3.1). The component of speech assigned to the vocal fold vibration is just one example of possible differences between speech sound…

1. Introduction Palatalization characterizes a set of phonetic and/or phonological processes that have output segments produced with an articulation in or close to the palatal region (for a review, see Bhat 1978). This term has two common meanings: i. palatalization involves the shift of the articulation of a consonant toward the palatal region before front vowels, especially [i], and the glide [j] (e.g., /k/ > [tʃ] in Slavic and Arabic, and t > [tʃ] in Romance and Slavic); ii. palatalization adds a palatal articulation, generally co…