Ket phonology

Vowels

	Front	Central	Back
			unr.	rnd.
Close	i	ɨ		u
Close-mid	e	ə		o
Mid	ɛ1	ɜ	ʌ	ɔ1
Open-mid	æ	ɐ
Open	a 2		ɑ	ɒ

1. The normally open-mid /ɛ/ and /ɔ/ are pronounced as close-mid [e] and [o], respectively, when they have the high-steady tone.
2. /a/ freely varies between [æ], [a], [ɐ], and [ɑ].

Consonants

Vajda analyses Ket as having only 12 consonant phonemes:

		Bilabial	Alveolar	Palatal	Velar	Uvular	Glottal
Nasal		m	n		ŋ
Plosive	voiceless		t		k	q
	voiced	b	d
Fricative	central		s	ç			h
	lateral		ɮ

It is one of the few languages to lack both /p/ and /ɡ/, along with Arapaho, Goliath and Efik, as well as most varieties of Arabic.

There is much allophony, and the phonetic inventory of consonants is essentially as below. This is the level of description reflected by the Ket alphabet.

			Bilabial	Alveolar	Palatal	Velar	Uvular	Glottal
Nasal			m	n	ɲ	ŋ	ɴ
Plosive		voiceless	p	t	c	k	q	ʔ
		voiced	b	d	ɟ	ɡ	ɢ
Fricative	central	voiceless	ɸ	s	ç	x	χ	h
		voiced	β	z	ʝ	ɣ	ʁ	ɦ
	lateral			ɮ	ʎ̝	ʟ̝
Flap	central		ⱱ̟	ɾ
	lateral			ɺ	ʎ̆	ʟ̆
Trill			ʙ	r

Furthermore, all nasal consonants in Ket have voiceless allophones at the end of a monosyllabic word with a glottalized or descending tone (i.e. [m, n, ŋ] turn into [m̥, n̥, ŋ̥]), likewise, [ɮ] becomes [ɬ] in the same situation. Alveolars are often pronounced laminal and possibly palatalized, though not in the vicinity of a uvular consonant. /q/ is normally pronounced with affrication, as [qᵡ].

Tone

Descriptions of Ket vary widely in the number of contrastive tones they report: as many as eight and as few as zero have been counted. Given this wide disagreement, whether or not Ket is a tonal language is debatable, although recent works by Ket specialists Edward Vajda and Stefan Georg defend the existence of tone.

In tonal descriptions, Ket does not employ a tone on every syllable but instead uses one tone per word. Following Vajda's description of Southern Ket, the five basic tones are as follows:

Tone name	Glottalized	High-Even	Rising Falling	Falling	Rising High-Falling
Tone contour	[˧˦ʔ] (34’)	[˥] (5)	[˩˧.˧˩] (13.31)	[˧˩] (31)	[˩˧.˥˧] (13.53)
Example	[kɛʔt] "person"	[sýl] "blood"	[su᷈ːl] ([sǔûl]) "hand sled"	[qàj] "elk"	[bə̌ntân] "mallard ducks"

The glottalized tone features pharyngeal or laryngeal constriction, or a full glottal stop that interrupts the vowel.

Georg's 2007 description of Ket tone is similar to the above, but reduces the basic number of tonemes to four, while moving the rising high-falling tone plus a variant to a class of tonemes only found in multisyllabic words. With some exceptions caused by certain prefixes or clitics, the domain of tones in a multisyllabic word is limited to the first two syllables.

External links

• Ket language