Consonants[]
For illustrative purposes, the following chart is the consonant inventory of the Hualapai dialect of the language, which varies slightly from the Havasupai dialect. Because the two dialects have different orthographies, IPA symbols are used here. For more information about how these sounds are depicted in writing, see the Orthography section of this page.
| Bilabial | Labial | Dental | Alveolar | Palatal | Velar | Uvular | Glottal | |||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| plain | lab. | plain | lab. | plain | lab. | |||||||
| Plosive | plain | p | t̪ | t | k | kʷ | q | qʷ | ʔ | |||
| aspirated | pʰ | t̪ʰ | tʰ | kʰ | ||||||||
| Fricative | β | f, v | θ | s | h | |||||||
| Affricate | plain | t͡ʃ | ||||||||||
| aspirated | t͡ʃʰ | |||||||||||
| Nasal | m | n | ɲ | ŋ | ||||||||
| Lateral | l | |||||||||||
| Flap | ɾ | |||||||||||
| Approximant | w | j | ||||||||||
As shown from the chart above, aspiration is a contrastive feature in many stops and affricates in Hualapai-Havasupai. Often, consonant sounds are realized in different ways in different phonetic environments. For example, if a glottal stop occurs at the beginning of a word, it may sometimes be replaced by a vowel such as /a/.
The phonemic difference between /β/ and /v/ is widely discussed in the literature. Watahomigie et al. poses that the use of /β/ is attributed to older generations of Hualapai dialect speakers, and Edwin Kozlowski notes that in the Hualapai dialect, [v] is weakened to [β] in weak-stressed syllables. Thus, the underlying form /v-ul/ "to ride" surfaces as [βəʔul].
Long and short vowels are contrastive in the language. The following is a minimal pair illustrating of the phonemic contrast of Havasupai-Hualapai vowel length: 'pa:ʔ' (meaning person) vs. 'paʔ' (meaning arrow).
| Front | Central | Back | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Close | i iː | u uː | |
| Mid | e eː | o oː | |
| Open | æ æː | ||
| a aː |
Short vowels may sometimes be reduced to [ə] or dropped completely when they occur in an unstressed syllable, primarily in a word-initial context. In addition to this chart, there are four attested diphthongs that are common for this language: /aʊ/ as in 'cow', /aɪ/ as in 'lie', /eɪ/ as in 'they', and /ui/ as in 'buoy'.
Stress[]
Havasupai-Hualapai's prosodic system is stress-timed, which governs many parts of the phonological structure of the language, including where long vowels occur, what kind of consonant clusters can occur and where, and how syllable boundaries are divided. There are three types of stress: primary, secondary, and weak. All vowels can have any of these three types of stress, but syllabic consonants can only have weak stress. Primary stresses occur at regularly timed intervals in an utterance. Secondary stresses occur according to an alternating-stress system, which most commonly dictates that two secondary stresses follow a primary stressed (phonetically long) vowel.
Syllabic structure[]
The most common syllable structures that occur in Havasupai-Hualapai are CV, CVC, and VC; however, consonant clusters of two or three consonants can and do occur initially, medially, and finally.
At word boundaries, syllabification breaks up consonant clusters to CVC or CV structure as much as is possible. CCC and CCCC clusters occur, but they are always broken up by a syllable boundary (that is, C-CC/CC-C or CC-CC). Syllable-initial CC clusters are either composed of (1) /θ/, /s/, or /h/, followed by any consonant or (2) any consonant followed by /w/.