Initial consonant mutation is also found in Indonesian or Malay, in Nivkh, in Southern Paiute and in several West African languages such as Fula.
The Nilotic language Dholuo, spoken in Kenya, shows mutation of stem-final consonants, as does English to a small extent.
Also, Japanese exhibits word medial consonant mutation involving voicing, rendaku, in many compounds.
Sandhi effects like these (or other phonological processes) are usually the historical origin of morphosyntactically triggered mutation.
After most endings were lost in English, and the contrast between voiced and voiceless fricatives partly phonemicized (largely due to the influx of French loanwords), the alternation was morphologized.
That resulted in some alternations, many of which have been levelled, but traces occur in some word doublets such as ditch /dɪtʃ/ and dike /daɪk/.
One subtype affects the sibilant consonants: earlier /sj/ and /zj/ were palatalized, leading to an alternation between alveolar /s z/ and postalveolar /ʃ ʒ/.
Another unproductive layer results from the Vulgar Latin palatalization of velar stops before front vowels.
Here are some examples from Breton, Cornish, Irish, Scottish Gaelic, and Welsh: Older textbooks on Gaelic sometimes refer to the c → ch mutation as "aspiration", but it is not aspiration in the sense of the word used by modern phoneticians, and linguists prefer to speak of lenition here.
Historically, the Celtic initial mutations originated from progressive assimilation and sandhi phenomena between adjacent words.
For example, the mutating effect of the conjunction a 'and' is from the word once having the form *ak, and the final consonant influenced the following sounds.
In Russian, consonant mutation and alternations are a very common phenomenon during word formation, conjugation and in comparative adjectives.
However, in Modern Hebrew, stop and fricative variants of ב, כ and פ are sometimes distinct phonemes: For a more in depth discussion of this phenomenon, see Begadkefat.
Examples: The third type of consonant mutation occurs when phonemes /p, pʰ, b, t, tʰ, d/, after the nasalized final /ɴ/, become /m/ in compound words: Mutation of the initial consonant of verbs is a feature of several languages in the Southern Oceanic branch of the Austronesian language family.
The Gombe dialect spoken in Nigeria, for example, shows mutation triggered by declension class.
[9] The colloquial language (especially Jakartan Indonesian) drops me- prefix but tends to replace it with nasalization in some consonants:[citation needed] More information is available in the Latvian Wikipedia.