Romansh has up to 26 consonant phonemes. Two are only found in some varieties, and one is found only in loanwords borrowed from German.
| Labial | Labio- dental |
Dental and alveolar |
Palato- alveolar |
Alveolo- palatal |
Palatal | Velar | Glottal | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Nasal | m | n | ɲ | 1ŋ | ||||
| Plosive | p b | t d | k ɡ | |||||
| Affricate | ts | tʃ | 2tɕ dʑ | |||||
| Fricative | f v | s z | ʃ ʒ | 3ç | 4h | |||
| Approximant | j | |||||||
| Lateral | l | ʎ | ||||||
| Trill | 5r |
| Monophthongs | Front | Central | Back |
|---|---|---|---|
| Close | i y | u | |
| Close-mid | e ø | o | |
| Mid | ɛ | ɔ | |
| Open | a | ||
The vowel inventory varies somewhat between dialects, as the front rounded vowels /y/ and /ø/ and are found only in Putèr and Vallader. They have historically been unrounded in the other varieties and are found only in recent loans from German there. They are not found in the pan-regional variety Rumantsch Grischun either. The now nearly extinct Sutsilvan dialects of the Heinzenberg have /œ/ as in plànta 'plant, tree', but this is etymologically unrelated to the [ø] found in Putèr and Vallader. It is regarded as either a marginal phoneme or not a separate phoneme from /u/ by some linguists.[1]
Word stress generally falls either on the last or the penult syllable of a word. Unstressed vowels are generally reduced to a schwa. Vowel length is predictable:
- Unstressed vowels are short.
- Stressed vowels in closed syllables (those with a coda) are:
- long before /r/
- short elsewhere
- Stressed vowels in open syllables are:
- short before voiceless consonants
- long elsewhere
The amount of diphthongs varies significantly between dialects. Sursilvan dialects contain eleven diphthongs and four triphthongs ([ɪau], [ɪɛu], [uau], and [uɛi]).
| Diphthongs | Falling | Rising |
|---|---|---|
| Closing | [aɪ] [au] [ɛɪ] [ɛu] [uɪ] | |
| Centering | [iə] | |
| Opening | [ɪu] [uɔ] | [uɛ] [ɪa] [ua] |
Other dialects have different inventories; Putèr for instance lacks [au], [ɛu], and [uɛ] as well as the triphthongs but has [yə], which is missing in Sursilvan. A phenomenon known as "hardened diphthongs", in which the second vowel of a falling Diphthong is pronounced as [k], was once common in Putèr as well, but is nowadays limited to Surmiran: strousch 'barely > [ʃtrokʃ].
References[]
- ↑ Liver 1999