Word.ws English Dictionary

chain shift

chain shift noun: a phonological modification of a vowel system or sometimes consonant system in which a change in a particular vowel or consonant causes other adjacent vowels or consonants to also change in order to avoid phonemic mergers.

Noun

chain shift (plural chain shifts)

  1. A phonological modification of a vowel system or sometimes consonant system in which a change in a particular vowel or consonant causes other adjacent vowels or consonants to also change in order to avoid phonemic mergers.
    • Many non-Antipodeans cannot readily distinguish Australian and New Zealand English, because the phonologies basically overlap with the exception of an upwards chain shift in the front vowels.2019, Li Huang, James Lambert, “Another Arrow for the Quiver: A New Methodology for Multilingual Researchers”, in Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development, →DOI, page 10

Forms of chain shift

pluralchain shifts

Questions about chain shift

What does chain shift mean?
Chain shift means a phonological modification of a vowel system or sometimes consonant system in which a change in a particular vowel or consonant causes other adjacent vowels or consonants to also change in order to avoid phonemic mergers.
What part of speech is chain shift?
Chain shift is a noun.
What is the plural of chain shift?
The plural of chain shift is chain shifts.

Words near chain shift in the dictionary

  1. chain reaction
  2. chain reactions
  3. chain rule
  4. chain saw
  5. chain saws
  6. chain shift
  7. chain shifts
  8. chain shot
  9. chain shots
  10. chain sickle
  11. chain sickles

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: chain shift (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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Cite this entry: “chain shift.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/chain_shift. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.