Abstract
The phonologies of the world’s languages vary in their static properties, such as segment inventories and phonotactics, but also in their dynamic, morphophonological alternations. The dynamic phonology of Australian languages has been significantly understudied. Here we draw on a dataset of morphophonological alternations in 118 languages. Two topics are chosen for their particular interest with respect to Australian languages: lenition and assimilation. The coverage here represents the most in-depth survey of both phenomena in Australian languages at the time of writing. For reasons of space, we cover the most common and widespread kinds of lenition processes in Australian languages: alternations in syllable onset position between stops and more sonorous oral segments or zero, in which the alternations are phonologically conditioned by the sonority of the segment on the left; and local assimilation between adjacent consonants, and between vowels in adjacent syllables.