Lenition - Common Characteristics

Common Characteristics

Common examples include voicing or sonorization, as in → ; affrication or spirantization (turning into an affricate or a fricative), as in → → ; debuccalization (loss of place), as in → ; degemination, as in → ; deglottalization, such as →, etc. These may occur one after the other in the history of a language. Eventually, consonants may be lost completely, which is the ultimate lenition. Lenition, then, can be seen as a movement on the sonority hierarchy from less sonorous to more sonorous, or on a strength hierarchy from stronger to weaker.

Lenition occurs especially often intervocalically (between vowels). In this position, lenition can be seen as a type of assimilation of the consonant to the surrounding vowels, in which features of the consonant that are not present in the surrounding vowels (e.g. obstruction, voicelessness) are gradually eliminated.

The opposite of lenition is called fortition, which is a less common sound change.