Huave of San Mateo del Mar is partly tonal, distinguishing between high and low tone in penultimate syllables only. Huave is one of only two Mesoamerican languages not to have a phonemic glottal stop (the other is Purépecha).
The phonemic inventory, reconstructed for the common ancestor of the four existing Huave varieties as presented in Campbell 1997, is as follows:
- Consonants: [p, t, ts, k, kʷ, ᵐb, ⁿd, ᵑɡ, ɡʷ, s, l, r, w, h] (and [ɾ, j, ð] as marginal phonemes)
- Vowels: [i, e, a, ɨ, o, u] (and, depending on the variety, vowel length, low and high tone, aspiration).
These phonemes are from the phonology of San Francisco del Mar Huave. The San Dionisio del Mar dialect has an additional vowel phoneme, /y/, cognate with /e/ in San Mateo.
Vowels: /i, e, u, o, ɑ/. All vowels have aspirated forms.
| Bilabial | Alveolar | Palatal | Velar | Glottal | |||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| plain | labialized | ||||||
| Stop | voiceless | p | t | k | kʷ | ||
| prenasalized | mb | nd | ŋg | ŋgʷ | |||
| Affricate | voiceless | t͡s | |||||
| prenasalized | nt͡s | ||||||
| Fricative | s | h | |||||
| Nasal | m | n | |||||
| Approximant | l | j | |||||
| Trill | r | ||||||
| Flap | ɾ | ||||||