Frequency, overlap and origins of palatal sonorants in three Iberian languages

Abstract

The frequency distributions of sounds within languages are closely related to how languages arise and develop over time. Palatal consonants did not exist in Latin, but they flourished in the Romance languages, especially in the Iberian Peninsula. Still, they are considered complex or marked segments because they are inherently heavy and restricted in terms of their distribution, in relation to other consonants. This study correlates intra and interlanguage frequency across three Iberian languages, namely Galician, Portuguese, and Spanish based on a Wiktionary sample. Beyond extracting the frequency values, we calculate the overlap of specific lexical items containing these phonemes. Finally, we assess the relevance of the etymological pathways to the frequency observed in each language using a list of aligned cognates. We find that, in spite of some contamination through contact, the frequencies in synchronic and diachronic data of /ʎ/ and /ɲ/ in Galician match those of Portuguese and not Spanish. These results suggest low-frequency consonants are highly relevant to language classification.