Assimilation (linguistics)
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, in English "handbag" (), the often shifts to in rapid speech, becoming , because and are both bilabial (produced with both lips), and their places of articulation are similar. It occurs in normal speech but is more frequent in faster speech. Sometimes the change is accepted as canonical, and can even become recognized in standard spelling: implosion pronounced with , composed of ''in-'' + ''-plosion'' (as in ''explosion''). Sound segments typically assimilate to a following sound, but they may also assimilate to a preceding one. Assimilation most commonly occurs between immediately adjacent sounds but may occur between sounds separated by others. For example, in "handbag," the is sometimes elided (omitted), which caus ...
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Phonology
Phonology (formerly also phonemics or phonematics: "phonemics ''n.'' [''obsolescent''] 1. Any procedure for identifying the phonemes of a language from a corpus of data. 2. (formerly also phonematics) A former synonym for phonology, often preferred by the American Structuralists and reflecting the importance in structuralist work of phonemics in sense 1.": "phonematics ''n.'' 1. [''obsolete''] An old synonym for phonemics (sense 2).") is the branch of linguistics that studies how languages systematically organize their phonemes or, for sign languages, their constituent parts of signs. The term can also refer specifically to the sound or sign system of a particular language variety. At one time, the study of phonology related only to the study of the systems of phonemes in spoken languages, but now it may relate to any Linguistic description, linguistic analysis either: Sign languages have a phonological system equivalent to the system of sounds in spoken languages. The buil ...
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