Coalescence

In phonetics and historical linguistics, fusion, or coalescence, is a sound change

where two or more segments with distinctive features merge into a single
segment. This can occur both on consonants and in vowels. A word like
educate is one that may exhibit fusion, e.g. /ɛdjʊkeɪt/ or /ˈɛdʒʊkeɪt/. A merger
between two segments can also occur between word boundaries, an example
being the phrase got ya being pronounced like gotcha /ɡɒtʃə/. Most cases of
fusion lead to allophonic variation, though some sequences of segments may
lead to wholly distinct phonemes.

A common form of fusion is found in the development of nasal vowels, which

frequently become phonemic when final nasal consonants are lost from a
language. This occurred in French and Portuguese. Compare the French words
un vin blanc [œ̃ vɛ ̃ blɑ̃] "a white wine" with their English cognates, one, wine,
blank, which retain the n's.

English
Historically, the alveolar plosives and fricatives have fused with /j/, in a process referred to as
yod coalescence. Words like nature and omission have had such consonant clusters, being
pronounced like /naːˈtiu̯ r/ and /ɔˈmisjən/. Words ending in the Latin-derived suffixes -tion and
-sion, such as fiction and mission, are examples that exhibit yod coalescence.

This sound change was not, however, distributed evenly. Words like module may be realised as
either /ˈmɒdjuːl/ or /ˈmɒdʒuːl/. Words that did not experience universal yod coalescence, are
always realised as two segments in accents like Received Pronunciation. Most other dialects do
pronounce them as one segment, however, like American English.

Words with primary stress on a syllable with such a cluster did not experience coalescence
either. Examples include tune /tjuːn/ and assume /əˈsjuːm/. Some dialects exhibit coalescence
in these cases, where some coalesce only /tj/ and /dj/, while others also coalesce /sj/ and /zj.
In General American, /j/ elides entirely when proceding alveolar consonants, in a process
called yod dropping. The previous examples end up as /tuːn/ and /əˈsuːm/. Words that have
already coalesced are not affect by this.

Australian English exhibits yod coalescence to an extreme degree, even when the cluster is in a
stressed syllable, though there is some sociolectal variation. In an accent with full yod
coalescence, tune and assume are pronounced like /tʃuːn/ and /əˈʃuːm/. This can result in
homophony between previously distinct words, as between tuner and tuna, which are both
pronounced /tʃuːnə/.