Consonant mutation

In some languages morphological processes are signaled by changes in consonants rather than vowels in the base, root, or stem. Such processes are called consonant mutations. As with the vowel processes noted above, consonant mutations may occur alone or in conjunction with prefixes or suffixes.

In (8a), in the West Atlantic language Seereer-Siin, some noun diminutives are formed by replacing the first stop consonant in the stem, for example [p, k, d] in the words in (8a), with the corresponding prenasalized stop ([mb, ŋ g, nd]). And in Chemehuevi, illustrated in (8b), the reflexive of a verb is formed by prefixing na- and changing the initial stop consonant of the root to a voiced continuant ([p] becomes [v], [t] becomes [r], and [k] becomes [ɣ]).