Suvarna Garge (Editor)

Acehnese phonology

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Acehnese has a large vowel inventory, with ten oral monophthong vowels, twelve oral diphthongs, seven nasal monophthong vowels, and five nasal diphthongs.

Contents

Vowels

Native-speaking linguists divide vowels in Acehnese into several categories: oral monophthongs, oral diphthongs (which are further divided into the ones ending with /ə/ and with /i/), nasal monophthongs, and nasal diphthongs.

Oral vowels

Oral monophthong vowels in Acehnese are shown in the table below.

Oral diphthong vowels ending with /ə/ are shown in the table below.

Oral diphthong vowels ending with /i/ are shown in the table below.

Nasal vowels

Nasal monophthong vowels in Acehnese are shown in the table below.

Consonants

The table below shows the Acehnese consonant phonemes and the range of their realizations.

Notes:

  • Syllable-final k always represents /ʔ/ save in certain recent loans
  • /f/, /z/, and /ʃ/ are borrowed sounds, and are often replaced by /ph/, /dh/, and /ch/ respectively
  • /mb/, /nd/, /ɲɟ/, and /ŋɡ/ are also known as "funny nasals"
  • Sound-spelling correspondences

    In addition to the modern 26 letter basic Latin alphabet, Acehnese uses the supplementary letters è, é, ë, ô, and ö, making a total of 31 letters in its orthography.

    Notes:

  • ë is used only for diphthongs ending with /ə/
  • References

    Acehnese phonology Wikipedia