This article is about the sound system of the Navajo language. The phonology of Navajo is intimately connected to its morphology. For example, the entire range of contrastive consonants is found only at the beginning of word stems. In stem-final position and in prefixes, the number of contrasts is drastically reduced. Similarly, vowel contrasts (including their prosodic combinatory possibilities) found outside of the stem are significantly neutralized. For details about the morphology of Navajo, see Navajo grammar.
Consonants[]
The consonant phonemes of Navajo are listed below.
| Bilabial | Alveolar | Palato- alveolar |
Palatal | Velar | Glottal | |||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| plain | lateral | affricate | plain | lab. | ||||||
| Nasal | plain | m | n | |||||||
| glottalized | (mˀ) | (nˀ) | ||||||||
| Stop | unaspirated | p | t | tˡ | ts | tʃ | k | ʔ | ||
| aspirated | (pʰ) | tʰ | tɬʰ | tsʰ | tʃʰ | kʰ | kʷʰ | |||
| ejective | tʼ | tɬʼ | tsʼ | tʃʼ | kʼ | |||||
| Continuant | fortis | s | ɬ | ʃ | x | xʷ | ||||
| lenis | z | l | ʒ | j | ɣ | ɣʷ | ||||
| Glide | plain | |||||||||
| glottalized | (jˀ) | (wˀ) | ||||||||
Vowels[]
Navajo has four contrastive vowel qualities [i, e, o, ɑ] at three different vowel heights (high, mid, low) and a front-back contrast between the mid vowels [e, o]. There are also two contrastive vowel lengths and a contrast in nasalization. This results in 16 phonemic vowels, shown below.
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