Palatalization and affrication of velar stops in the (western) Cretan dialect

Abstract

This study examined a well-known feature of the Cretan dialect, namely the palatalization and affrication of voiceless velar stops triggered by following front vowels /i/ and /e/ and the high glide. The material was drawn from conversational speech uttered by five male speakers of the western Cretan dialect. The results revealed three realizations of the underlying voiceless velar stop /k/, specifically a standard palatal stop [c] realization and two dialectal ones, a palatal [c c ] and an alveolo-palatal [t ɕ ] affricate. Dialectal realizations occurred more frequently in stressed syllables than unstressed ones and in word-medial syllables than in syllables in word edges.