When a consonant reveals what village you are from

PalmaSome time ago I went to a party full of people from Manacor with a friend from out of town. A guy who wanted to meet her asked her to repeat “What color is Saint James’ white horse?” This apparently harmless phrase is a shibboleth, a formula that characterizes members of a linguistic group because it repeats a sound unknown to speakers of another language or dialect. Curiously, the word ‘xibòlet’ comes from the Bible, from the book of Judges, in which it is explained how forty-two thousand Ephraimites died for not being able to pronounce like our ‘x’ the initial consonant of the word, which they emitted as an ‘s’, which differentiated them from the rest of the Hebrews.

Along the same lines, the guy at the party was well aware that he had asked my friend to say ‘quin’, ‘cavall’, and ‘blanc’ and that depending on whether she pronounced ‘que’ and ‘gue’ (transcribed as [k] and [g] in phonetics) or ‘quie’ and ‘guie’ (transcribed as [c] and [ɟ]) he could tell if she was from Manacor or not. In this town, among others, we pronounce these words differently, almost as if we had inserted an ‘i’ between the consonants ‘q’ (or ‘c’) and ‘g’ and the rest of the word. However, as you can imagine, unlike the Ephraimites, my friend did not cost her life to say ‘blan[k]’ and not ‘blan[c]’. If you think about it a little, you surely know other shibboleths, such as the typical “sixteen judges from a court eat the liver of a hanged man”, which is associated with the Reapers’ War, and which served to differentiate Catalan speakers who pronounce ‘set[z]e’ (with a voiced ‘s’) from non-Catalan speakers, who pronounce ‘set[s]e’ (with an unvoiced ‘s’).

Palatalization of velars

What is colloquially called ‘fer la quie’ or ‘quequejar’ which we do in some sub-varieties of Mallorcan Catalan, is known in linguistics as velar palatalization. In Catalan, the occlusive consonants ‘q’ (or ‘c’) and ‘g’ ([k] and [g]), have a velar point of articulation, that is, the area of the oral cavity where the constriction necessary to produce the sound occurs is the soft palate. But these varieties of Mallorcan in which ‘quequeja’ is produced, in certain contexts, these ‘c’ or ‘q’ and ‘g’ sounds in a palatalized way, that is, with the back of the tongue in contact with the palate. If you want to check it, try saying ‘fo[ɟ]eró’ with your mouth full. You’ll see it’s much harder: the tongue needs to reach the palate, and with a croquette or a mouthful of bread with oil it’s not easy at all.

But this realization (of [c] and [ɟ]) coexists with [k] and [g] depending on the context. Have you ever been asked “ets de Manaquior?”. If you have been told so, and you are a palatalizer, you will know that in front of an ‘o’ you would never make this sound. And it is because this alternation generally occurs in all positions except before the posterior series vowels ([ò], [ó], [u]), before the voiced consonant (the ‘r’ of ‘cara’) or before a lateral consonant (‘l’ and ‘ll’). It occurs, however, in the rest of the contexts, and that is why we generally say ‘[c]avall’ and not ‘[k]avall’, and ‘blan[c]’ and not ‘blan[k]’, but we say ‘[k]olor’ regardless of our place of origin and also ‘Mana[k]or’.

Now, this articulation is not exclusive to Manacor, but is also present in Palma, Marratxí, Calvià, Puigpunyent, Valldemossa, Algaida, Lloret, Sant Joan, Pollença, ses Salines, Santanyí, Felanitx, and Sant Llorenç. However, if you are from the first four municipalities I have mentioned and you don’t ‘quequejau’, don’t think you are aliens, because in these places palatalization has begun a process of regression, especially among young people, probably due to the influence of Spanish. On the other hand, in other places it has a very notable vitality, for example, in Manacor, where palatalization is the most extreme, so that the ‘c’ or ‘q’ can become the same as in Spanish in the word ‘chato’, and the ‘g’ can resemble the word ‘yate’. In fact, if you are from Manacor, try saying the first syllable of ‘gata’ in Catalan and ‘yate’ in Spanish, and you will see that they sound the same.

Point of articulation

However, do not think that we Majorcans are so original. It is a general linguistic tendency that the occlusive consonants (in Catalan you will know which ones they are from the words ‘petaca’ and ‘bodega’) tend to slightly vary their point of articulation depending on the vowel that follows them, and in fact, with palatal vowels this point of articulation tends to advance. In peninsular Spanish there are indications of a certain articulatory advancement of the voiceless velar consonant (the [k]) before front vowels (‘e’ and ‘i’). And what is more important, regarding Chilean Spanish, extreme advancement is spoken of, so that broadly speaking we could say that there is palatalization in words like ‘quise’. Thus, ‘qui’ in Catalan pronounced by someone from Felanitx, Pollença or Palma (in theory), sounds the same as the first syllable of ‘quise’ pronounced by a Chilean. Doesn't that seem fascinating to you? Nor is it an alternation exclusive to Romance languages. In modern Greek, there is a palatal realization in words like ‘[c]ima’, and a velar realization in other words like ‘[k]osmos’, where [k] is followed by a back vowel.

From now on, if someone asks you “what color is Saint James’s white horse?”, you will know that it is not an innocent question. You will surely not risk your life over it, like the Ephraimites in the Bible, but you will have revealed a small clue about your origin. Perhaps this is one of the most fascinating things about languages: that, sometimes, a single consonant is enough for everyone to know where we come from.