Spirantization is a lenition process. In spirantization, a plosive or an affricate "weakens" to a fricative (or spirant). Sometimes, an affricate is formed in an intermediary step. Lenition is a kind of consonant mutation that appears in many languages. ... A stop or plosive or occlusive is a consonant sound produced by stopping the airflow in the vocal tract. ... An affricate is a consonant that begins like a stop (most often an alveovelar, such as [t] or [d]) and that doesnt have a release of its own, but opens directly into a fricative (or, in one language, into a trill). ... Note: This page contains phonetic information presented in the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) using Unicode. ...
Examples of the spirantization process
Spanish
In spoken Spanish, intervocalic voiced plosives undergo spirantization: This article is about the international language known as Spanish. ...
Plosive
Spirantization
[b]
→ [β]
[d]
→ [ð]
[g]
→ [ɣ]
For a diachronical example, see Germanic spirant law. In linguistics, the Germanic spirant law, sometimes referred to by the German term Primärberührung, is a specific historical instance of assimilation which occurred at an early stage in the history of the Germanic languages and is regarded by some as being early enough to fall into the same...
The goal of the study was to determine the level of frication of the spirant allophones relative to the approximant /1/ and to the fricatives /s, z/ by measuring noise components.
The results of their investigation determined that the noise levels for the spirants were more similar to approximants such as /1/ than to fricatives such as /s/ or /z/, in that the noise levels were more periodic in nature--with periodicity being more characteristic of sonorants (such as approximants) and vowels than of obstruents.
The spirantization pattern is said to originate historically in the postvocalic context and, in many dialects, the pattern is said to be gradually extending to other contexts of decreasing sonority, such as following glides, liquids, and the fricative [s] (Amastae 1995, Widdison 1997b).
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