 | This article needs additional citations for verification .(August 2015) |
This article describes the phonology of the Oromo language .
| | This article needs additional citations for verification .(August 2015) |
This article describes the phonology of the Oromo language .
The Oromo language has 24 to 28 consonant phonemes depending on the dialect.
| Labial | Alveolar/ Retroflex | Palato- alveolar | Velar | Glottal | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Nasal | m | n | ɲ ⟨ny⟩ | |||
| Plosive Affricate | voiceless | ( p ) | t | tʃ ⟨ch⟩ | k | ʔ ⟨'⟩ |
| voiced | b | d | dʒ ⟨j⟩ | ɡ | ||
| ejective | pʼ ⟨ph⟩ | tʼ ⟨x⟩ | tʃʼ ⟨c⟩ | kʼ ⟨q⟩ | ||
| implosive | ᶑ ⟨dh⟩ | |||||
| Fricative | voiceless | f | s | ʃ ⟨sh⟩ | x ⟨kh⟩ | h |
| voiced | ( v ) | ( z ) | ||||
| Approximant | w | l | j ⟨y⟩ | |||
| Rhotic | r | |||||
/ᶑ/ is a voiced retroflex plosive. It may have an implosive quality for some speakers.
The voiceless stops /t/ and /k/ are always aspirated.
/d/ and /t/ are dental
The velar fricative [x] is mainly used in the eastern dialect (Harar) as a phoneme. It is represented as ⟨kh⟩ in the Oromo script (Qubee) though it is pronounced as a ⟨k⟩ in most other dialects. [1]
Oromo has five vowels which all contrast long and short vowels. Sometimes there is a change in vowel quality when the vowel is short. Short vowels tend to be more centralized than their counterparts.
Though sometimes diphthongs may occur, there are none that occur in a word's unaltered form.
| Front | Central | Back | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Close | i /ɪ/, ii /iː/ | u /ʊ/, uu /uː/ | |
| Mid | e /ɛ/, ee /eː/ | o /ɔ/, oo /oː/ | |
| Open | a /ɐ/ | aa /ɑː/ |
When needed, the conventions for marking tone in written Oromo are as follows:
Tones on long vowels are marked on the first vowel symbol.
In Oromo, the tone-bearing unit is the mora rather than the vowel of the syllable. A long vowel or a diphthong consists of two morae and can bear two tones. Each mora is defined as being of high or low tone. Only one high tone occurs per word and this must be on the final or penultimate mora. Particles do not have a high tone. (These include prepositions, clitic pronouns for subject and object, impersonal subject pronouns and focus markers.) There are therefore three possible "accentual patterns" in word roots.
Phonetically there are three tones: high, low and falling. Rules:
This use of tone may be characterized as pitch accent. It is similar to that in Somali.
Stress is connected with tone. The high tone has strong stress; the falling tone has less stress and the low tone has no stress.
When a vowel occurs in word-initial position, a glottal stop ([ʔ]) is inserted before it.
Phonological changes occur at morpheme boundaries (sandhi) for specific grammatical morphemes. There may be assimilation.
The phonology of Catalan, a Romance language, has a certain degree of dialectal variation. Although there are two standard varieties, one based on Central Eastern dialect and another one based on South-Western or Valencian dialect, this article deals with features of all or most dialects, as well as regional pronunciation differences.
English phonology is the system of speech sounds used in spoken English. Like many other languages, English has wide variation in pronunciation, both historically and from dialect to dialect. In general, however, the regional dialects of English share a largely similar phonological system. Among other things, most dialects have vowel reduction in unstressed syllables and a complex set of phonological features that distinguish fortis and lenis consonants.
Jutlandic, or Jutish, is the western variety of Danish, spoken on the peninsula of Jutland in Denmark.
Swedish has a large vowel inventory, with nine vowels distinguished in quality and to some degree in quantity, making 18 vowel phonemes in most dialects. Another notable feature is the pitch accent, a development which it shares with Norwegian. Swedish pronunciation of most consonants is similar to that of other Germanic languages.
The sound system of Norwegian resembles that of Swedish. There is considerable variation among the dialects, and all pronunciations are considered by official policy to be equally correct – there is no official spoken standard, although it can be said that Eastern Norwegian Bokmål speech has an unofficial spoken standard, called Urban East Norwegian or Standard East Norwegian, loosely based on the speech of the literate classes of the Oslo area. This variant is the most common one taught to foreign students.
The phonology of Italian describes the sound system—the phonology and phonetics—of Standard Italian and its geographical variants.
The phonology of Japanese features a phonemic inventory including five vowels and 12 or more consonants. The phonotactics are relatively simple, allowing for few consonant clusters. Japanese phonology has been affected by the presence of several layers of vocabulary in the language: in addition to native Japanese vocabulary, Japanese has a large amount of Chinese-based vocabulary and loanwords from other languages.
Bernese German, like other High Alemannic varieties, has a two-way contrast in plosives and fricatives that is not based on voicing, but on length. The absence of voice in plosives and fricatives is typical for all High German varieties, but many of them have no two-way contrast due to general lenition.
The phonology of the Persian language varies between regional dialects, standard varieties, and even from older variates of Persian. Persian is a pluricentric language and countries that have Persian as an official language have separate standard varieties, namely: Standard Dari (Afghanistan), Standard Iranian Persian (Iran) and Standard Tajik (Tajikistan). The most significant differences between standard varieties of Persian are their vowel systems. Standard varieties of Persian have anywhere from 6 to 8 vowel distinctions, and similar vowels may be pronounced differently between standards. However, there are not many notable differences when comparing consonants, as all standard varieties a similar amount of consonant sounds. Though, colloquial varieties generally have more differences than their standard counterparts. Most dialects feature contrastive stress and syllable-final consonant clusters. Linguists tend to focus on Iranian Persian, so this article may contain less adequate information regarding other varieties.
This article describes the phonology of the Somali language.
This article describes those aspects of the phonological history of the English language which concern consonants.
The phonology of Bengali, like that of its neighbouring Eastern Indo-Aryan languages, is characterised by a wide variety of diphthongs and inherent back vowels.
This article discusses the phonological system of the Czech language.
The phonology of Turkish deals with current phonology and phonetics, particularly of Istanbul Turkish. A notable feature of the phonology of Turkish is a system of vowel harmony that causes vowels in most words to be either front or back and either rounded or unrounded. Velar stop consonants have palatal allophones before front vowels.
Taos is a Tanoan language spoken by several hundred people in New Mexico, in the United States. The main description of its phonology was contributed by George L. Trager in a (pre-generative) structuralist framework. Earlier considerations of the phonetics-phonology were by John P. Harrington and Jaime de Angulo. Trager's first account was in Trager (1946) based on fieldwork 1935-1937, which was then substantially revised in Trager (1948). The description below takes Trager (1946) as the main point of departure and notes where this differs from the analysis of Trager (1948). Harrington's description is more similar to Trager (1946). Certain comments from a generative perspective are noted in a comparative work Hale (1967).
The phonology of Welsh is characterised by a number of sounds that do not occur in English and are rare in European languages, such as the voiceless alveolar lateral fricative and several voiceless sonorants, some of which result from consonant mutation. Stress usually falls on the penultimate syllable in polysyllabic words, while the word-final unstressed syllable receives a higher pitch than the stressed syllable.
This article aims to describe the phonology and phonetics of central Luxembourgish, which is regarded as the emerging standard.
This article is about the phonology and phonetics of the West Frisian language.
This article covers the phonology of the Orsmaal-Gussenhoven dialect, a variety of Getelands spoken in Orsmaal-Gussenhoven, a village in the Linter municipality.
This article covers the phonology of the Kerkrade dialect, a West Ripuarian language variety spoken in parts of the Kerkrade municipality in the Netherlands and Herzogenrath in Germany.