Fronting (sound change)

Examples

Assimilation

In i-mutation and Germanic umlaut, a back vowel is fronted under the influence of or in a following syllable.

Vowel shifts

In the Attic and Ionic dialects of Ancient Greek, Proto-Greek close back were fronted to . This change occurred in all cases and was not triggered by a nearby front consonant or vowel. Similarly in French and Occitan, this sound change also occurred.

In Old English and Old Frisian, the back vowels were fronted to in certain cases. For more information, see first a-fronting and second a-fronting.

In many dialects of English, the vowel is fronted to or , a sound change that is sometimes called GOOSE-fronting. The same sound change occurred in many dialects of Norwegian and Standard Swedish but not in Danish.

Fronting can also take place as part of a chain shift. For example, in the Northern Cities Vowel Shift, the raising of left room in the low-front area of the vowel space for to expand. Thus, words like cot and father are often pronounced with a low-front vowel .

Speech disorders

Alveolarization, a specific type of fronting, is a commonly recognized adolescent speech sound disorder. English-speaking children who exhibit this disorder replace posterior consonants (specifically, palato-alveolars and velars) with anterior consonants (specifically, alveolars) . The (inter)dental fricatives may also be alveolarized to , though in which case it is a form of backing. Less commonly, the inverse situation may occur, in which anterior consonants are replaced with posterior consonants; this is also a form of backing.

Another common fronting speech disorder is labialization. English-speaking children who exhibit this disorder replace anterior consonants (both (inter)dentals and alveolars) with labial consonants (both labiodentals and bilabials) . Typically, the fricatives are fronted to labiodentals, while the occlusives are fronted to bilabials (aligning with the places that labial consonants occur in standard English phonology).

A disorder similar to but distinct from labialization is gliding. English-speaking children who exhibit this disorder replace liquid consonants with the semivowel (glide) , as well as to a lesser extent and in more restricted cases .

Consonant variation

In some dialects of English, the (inter)dental fricatives and the rhotic are fronted to labiodentals or to bilabials . Such processes are called th-fronting and r-labialization, respectively. In other dialects, the (inter)dental fricatives are instead backed to , a process called th-alveolarization. Due their association with speech disorders resulting in similar pronunciations, these dialectal variations are sometimes stigmatized.