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In phonology, assimilation is a sound change in which some phonemes (typically consonants or vowels) change to become more similar to other nearby sounds. This process is common across languages and can happen within a word or between words.
For example, the English suffix -s is pronounced [s] when it follows a voiceless phoneme (cats), and [z] when it follows a voiced phoneme (dogs). [1] This type of assimilation is called progressive, where the second consonant assimilates to the first; regressive assimilation goes in the opposite direction, as can be seen in have to [hæftə].
For example, chain shifts such as the Great Vowel Shift (in which nearly all of the vowels of the English language changed) or the allophonic differentiation of /s/, originally *[s], into [s z ʃ ʒ ʂ ʐ θ χ χʷ h], do not qualify as phonological change as long as all of the phones remain in complementary distribution.
Examples include tune /tjuːn/ and assume /əˈsjuːm/. Some dialects exhibit coalescence in these cases, where some coalesce only /tj/ and /dj/, while others also coalesce /sj/ and /zj/. In General American, /j/ elides entirely when following alveolar consonants, in a process called yod dropping. The previous examples end up as /tuːn/ and ...
In historical linguistics, a sound change is a change in the pronunciation of a language. A sound change can involve the replacement of one speech sound (or, more generally, one phonetic feature value) by a different one (called phonetic change) or a more general change to the speech sounds that exist (phonological change), such as the merger of two sounds or the creation of a new sound.
In French, a final /n/ sound disappeared, but left its trace in the nasalization of the preceding vowel, as in vin blanc [vɛ̃ blɑ̃], from historical [vin blaŋk].; In many languages (Sino-Tibetan, Austroasiatic, Oceanic, Celtic…), a vowel was nasalized by the nasal consonant preceding it: this "historical transfer of nasality between consonantal onset and vowel" is a case of ...
Coarticulation in phonetics refers to two different phenomena: the assimilation of the place of articulation of one speech sound to that of an adjacent speech sound. For example, while the sound /n/ of English normally has an alveolar place of articulation, in the word tenth it is pronounced with a dental place of articulation because the following sound, /θ/, is dental.
A different example of coronal harmony, sometimes referred to as NATI rule, occurs in Sanskrit, where [n] is retroflexed to [ɳ] if it is preceded by a retroflex continuant, mainly [ɽ] and [ʂ], in the same word, even at a distance. The retroflexion spreads from left to right affecting any coronal nasal until the word boundary is reached.