Lexical diffusion
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In historical linguistics, lexical diffusion is the theory that sound change originates in a single word or a small group of words and then spreads by analogy to other words with a similar phonological make-up, but may not spread to all words in which it potentially could apply. For example, in English, a sound change of /uː/ to /ʊ/ has happened in good and hood but not in food; some dialects have it in hoof and roof but others do not; in flood and blood it happened early enough that the words were affected by the change of /ʊ/ to /ʌ/, which is now no longer productive.
The theory of lexical diffusion stands in contrast to the Neogrammarian hypothesis that a given sound change applies simultaneously to all words in which its context is found.
William Labov, in Principles of Linguistic Change, takes the position that there are two types of sound changes: regular sound change (respecting the Neogrammarian hypothesis) and lexical diffusion. Labov lists a typology, according to which certain phenomena are typically or exclusively regular (example, vowel quality changes), while others (example, metathesis) tend to follow a lexical diffusion pattern.
Paul Kiparsky, in the Handbook of Phonology (Goldsmith editor), argues that under a proper definition of analogy as optimization, lexical diffusion is not a type of sound change.
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