Einlautung

Einlautung

German

Etymology

From ein (“in”) +‎ Laut (“sound”) +‎ -ung (“-ing”).

Noun

Einlautung f (genitive Einlautung, plural Einlautungen)

1. (linguistics, dialectology) the process by which a word that was borrowed from one language or dialect into a closely related other language/dialect, is adapted to the phonetic system of the latter based not on similarity of sound, but on typical etymological sound correspondences between both varieties

Declension

Declension of Einlautung

	singular			plural
	indef.	def.	noun	def.	noun
nominative	eine	die	Einlautung	die	Einlautungen
genitive	einer	der	Einlautung	der	Einlautungen
dative	einer	der	Einlautung	den	Einlautungen
accusative	eine	die	Einlautung	die	Einlautungen

Usage notes

• For example, the standard German word echt (“real, genuine”) was first borrowed into the Ripuarian dialect as ech. Here the loss of -t is not a case of Einlautung because Ripuarian simply does not allow final -t after another obstruent. However, the word was then further adapted by way of Einlautung in the variant ääch, where the lengthening of the vowel follows such pairs as German schlecht, recht vis-à-vis Ripuarian schlääch, rääch, etc.