Contraction (grammar)

A contraction is a shortened version of the spoken and written forms of a word, syllable, or word group, created by omission of internal letters and sounds.
In linguistic analysis, contractions should not be confused with crasis, abbreviations and initialisms, with which they share some semantic and phonetic functions, though all three are connoted by the term "abbreviation" in layman’s terms. Contraction is also distinguished from morphological clipping, where beginnings and endings are omitted.
The definition overlaps with the term portmanteau, but a distinction can be made between a portmanteau and a contraction by noting that contractions are formed from words that would otherwise appear together in sequence, such as do and not, whereas a portmanteau word is formed by combining two or more existing words that all relate to a singular concept that the portmanteau describes.

English

has a number of contractions, mostly involving the elision of a vowel, which is replaced by an apostrophe in writing, as in I'm for "I am", and sometimes other changes as well. Contractions are common in speech and in informal writing but tend to be avoided in more formal writing.
The main contractions are listed in the following table.

Full form	Contracted	Notes
I am	I'm	informal, as in "I'm here."
are	-'re	informal; we're /wɪər/ or /wɛər/ is, in most cases, pronounced differently from were /wɜr/.
does	-'s	informal, as in "What's he do there every day?"
is	-'s	informal, as in "He's driving right now."
has	-'s	informal, as in "She's been here before."
have	-'ve	informal, as in "I've never done this before."
had	-'d	informal, e.g. "He'd already left." or "We'd better go."
did	-'d	informal, as in "Where'd she go?"
would	-'d	informal, as in "We'd get in trouble if we broke the door."
will	-'ll	informal, as in "they'll call you later."
shall	-'ll	informal, as in "I'll call you later."
let us	let's	informal, as in "Let's do this."
going to	gonna	informal, as in "I'm gonna do it."
want to	wanna	informal, as in "I wanna do it."
of	o'-	standard in some fixed compounds, as in three ''o'clock, cat o' nine tails, jack-o'-lantern, will-o'-wisp, man o' war, run-o'-the-mill ; informal otherwise, as in "cup o' coffee", "barrel o' monkeys", "Land o' Goshen"
of the	o'-	standard in some fixed compounds, as in three o'clock, cat o' nine tails, jack-o'-lantern, will-o'-wisp, man o' war, run-o'-the-mill ; informal otherwise, as in "cup o' coffee", "barrel o' monkeys", "Land o' Goshen"
it was	'twas	archaic, except in stock uses such as 'Twas the night before Christmas
them	'em	informal, partially from hem, the original dative and accusative of they
you	y'-	2nd person pronoun has plurality marked in some varieties of English by combining with e.g. all, which is then usually contracted to y'all in which case it likely is standard
about	'bout	is very informal, e.g. I'll come by 'bout noon.
because	'cause	is very informal, e.g. Why did you do it? Just 'cause.
and	'n'	informal, as in "Fish 'n' chips."

	After, or as an inflectional suffix of, the auxiliary verb	After the subject
not	*Will not you attend?	Will you not attend?
-n't	Won't you attend?	*Will you n't attend?

Although can't, wouldn't and other forms ending n't clearly started as contractions, n't is now neither a contraction nor part of one but instead a negative inflectional suffix. Evidence for this is n't'' occurs only with auxiliary verbs, and clitics are not limited to particular categories or subcategories; again unlike contractions, their forms are not rule-governed but idiosyncratic ; and as shown in the table, the inflected and "uncontracted" versions may require different positions in a sentence.

Chinese

The Old Chinese writing system is well suited for the one-to-one correspondence between morpheme and glyph. Contractions in which one glyph represents two or more morphemes are a notable exception to that rule. About 20 or so are noted to exist by traditional philologists and are known as jiāncí, and more words have been proposed to be contractions by recent scholars, based on recent reconstructions of Old Chinese phonology, epigraphic evidence, and syntactic considerations. For example, 非 has been proposed to be a contraction of 不 + 唯/隹. The contractions are not generally graphically evident, and there is no general rule for how a character representing a contraction might be formed. As a result, the identification of a character as a contraction, as well as the word that are proposed to have been contracted, is sometimes disputed.
As vernacular Chinese dialects use sets of function words that differ considerably from Classical Chinese, almost all of the classical contractions that are listed below are now archaic and have disappeared from everyday use. However, modern contractions have evolved from the new vernacular function words. Modern contractions appear in all major modern dialect groups. For example, 别 'don't' in Standard Mandarin is a contraction of 不要, and 覅 'don't' in Shanghainese is a contraction of 勿要, as is apparent graphically. Similarly, in Northeastern Mandarin 甭 'needn't' is a phonological and graphical contraction of 不用. Finally, Cantonese contracts 乜嘢 'what?' to 咩.
;Table of Classical Chinese contractions

Full form	Transliteration	Contraction	Transliteration	Notes
之乎	tjə ga	諸	tjᴀ	In some rarer cases 諸 can also be contraction for 有之乎. 諸 can be used on its own with the meaning of "all, the class of", as in 諸侯 "the feudal lords."
若之何	njᴀ tjə gaj	奈何	najs gaj	-
^note	ʔa tjə	焉	ʔrjan	於之 is never used; only 焉.
之焉	tjə ʔrjan	旃	tjan	Rare.
^note	wja tjə	爰	wjan	Rare. The prepositions 於, 于, and 乎 are of different origin, but used interchangeably.
^note	nja tjə	然	njan
^note	wjot tjə	云	wjən
不之	pjə tjə	弗	pjət
毋之	mja tjə	勿	mjət	弗 and 勿 were originally not contractions, but were reanalyzed as contractions in the Warring States period.
而已	njə ljəʔ	耳	njəʔ
胡不	ga pjə	盍	gap	胡 is a variant of 何.
也乎	ljᴀjʔ ga	與	ljaʔ	Also written 歟.
也乎	ljᴀjʔ ga	邪	zjᴀ	Also written 耶. Probably a dialectal variant of 與.
不乎	pjə ga	夫	pja	夫 has many other meanings.

Dutch

Here are some of the contractions in Standard Dutch:

Full form	Contracted	Translation	Note
des	's	of	Genitive form of the Dutch article de "the"
een	'n	a, an
haar	d'r	her
hem	'm	him
het	't	it the
ik	'k	I
mijn	m'n	my
zijn	z'n	his
zo een	zo'n	such a

Informal Belgian Dutch uses a wide range of non-standard contractions such as "hoe's't", "hij's d'r", "w'ebbe' goe' g'ete'" and "wa's da'?" (from "wat is dat?" - what is that?. Some of these contractions:

Full form	Contracted	Translation	Note
there		-	-
dat	da'	that
dat is	da's	that is
dat ik	da'k	that I
ge	g'	you
is	's	is
wat	wa'	what
we	w'	we
ze	z'	she

French

has a variety of contractions like in English except that they are mandatory, as in C'est la vie in which c'est stands for ce + est. The formation of such contractions is called elision.
In general, any monosyllabic word ending in e caduc contracts if the following word begins with a vowel, h or y. In addition to ce → c'-, these words are que → qu'-, ne → n'-, se → s'-, je → j'-, me → m'-, te → t'- , le or la → l'-, and de → d'-. Unlike with English contractions, however, those contractions are mandatory: one would never say *ce est or *que elle.
Moi and toi mandatorily contract to m'- and t'-, respectively, after an imperative verb and before the word y or en.
It is also mandatory to avoid the repetition of a sound when the conjunction si is followed by il or ils, which begin with the same vowel sound i: *si il → s'il ; *si ils → s'ils.
Certain prepositions are also mandatorily merged with masculine and plural direct articles: au for à le, aux for à les, du for de le, and des for de les. However, the contraction of cela to ça is optional and informal.
In informal speech, a personal pronoun may sometimes be contracted onto a following verb. For example, je ne sais pas may be pronounced roughly chais pas, with the ne being completely elided and the of je being mixed with the of sais. It is also common in informal contexts to contract tu to t'- before a vowel: t'as mangé for tu as mangé.