affriquer

Affriquer is a technical linguistics term meaning to turn a stop consonant into an affricate — a sound that starts as a plosive and releases as a fricative, like the "ch" in English "chip". It appears almost exclusively in phonetics textbooks and dialectology studies of French sound changes.

• Dans certains dialectes, le t devant i tend à s'affriquer. — In some dialects, t before i tends to become an affricate.
• Les linguistes étudient comment ce phonème s'est affriqué au fil des siècles. — Linguists study how this phoneme became affricated over the centuries.
• Ce manuel explique le processus qui affrique une consonne occlusive. — This textbook explains the process that affricates a stop consonant.

Learners outside linguistics rarely encounter this verb at all — it isn't a general word for pronunciation change, but the specific technical term for a stop becoming an affricate, distinct from palatalization or other sound shifts.