iotation

Iotation is a form of palatalisation which occurs in Slavic languages. In most of them, iotated consonants are called soft consonants and the process of iotation is called softening. It occurs by the mixing of a consonant with the palatal approximant /j/, which is in the Greek alphabet represented by iota (ι), hence the name. For example, ni in English onion has the sound of iotated n. The example on the right shows how the Serbian language uses iotation to express the plural of a certain class of words.
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