Syncope (phonology)

In phonology, syncope (/ˈsɪŋkəpi/; from Ancient Greek:  sunkopḗ "cutting up") is the loss of one or more sounds from the interior of a word, especially the loss of an unstressed vowel. It is found both in synchronic analysis of languages and diachronics. Its opposite, whereby sounds are added, is epenthesis.

Synchronic analysis studies linguistic phenomena at one moment, usually the present. In modern languages, syncope occurs in inflection, poetry, and informal speech.

In languages such as Irish, the process of inflection can cause syncope.

For example:

It is interesting that if the present root form in Irish is the result of diachronic syncope, there is a resistance to synchronic syncope for inflection.

Sounds may be removed from the interior of a word as a rhetorical or poetic device, whether for embellishment or for the sake of the meter.

Various sorts of colloquial reductions might be called "syncope". It is also called compression.

Forms such as "didn't" that are written with an apostrophe are, however, generally called contractions:

In historical phonetics, the term "syncope" is often but not always limited to the loss of an unstressed vowel:

A syncope rule has been identified in Tonkawa, an extinct American Indian language, whereby the second vowel of a word deletes if it is not adjacent to a consonant cluster or final consonant.

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