High German consonant shift

The shift resulted in the affrication or spirantization of the West Germanic voiceless stop consonants /t/, /p/, and /k/, depending on position in a word.

Different dialects within Upper and Central German also received different levels of shift, with West Central German exhibiting what is known as the Rhenish fan, a gradual reduction of which consonants are shifted, as one moves north.

[14] /p t k/ remained unshifted in all dialects when following the fricative consonants /s/, /f/, and /x/ (examples: OHG spinnan Engl.

[1] In those Upper German dialects that shifted all three stops, there was likely no longer any distinction between voiced and voiceless consonants.

[27] The effects of the Medienverschiebung are most visible in the shift of /d/ to /t/; this is the change with the widest spread and the only one that was not partially reversed in the Old High German period.

[32][26][o] There is no agreement about the time period in which the High German consonantal shift took place.

[34] Its completion is usually dated to just before the earliest attestations of Old High German (8th century CE).

Here, the isoglosses defined by the occurrence of individual shifts are spread out in a fan-like manner, forming the Rheinischer Fächer ('Rhenish fan').

[39] Further north, the consonant shift is only found with the adverb auch 'also' and a handful of pronouns that have final /k/ shifted to /x/ (ich 'I', dich 'thee', mich 'me') in the South Low Franconian dialect area, with the Uerdingen line as its northern border.

[42][43] [44] The shift of root-initial and historically geminated /k/ to /kx/ (and further to /x/, as in Kind > Chind) occurs in the southern part of the Upper German dialect area.