There are nine Tangale vowels. Each occurs in a contrastive long and short form.
| Front | Back | |||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| close | open | close | ||
| High | i | ɪ | ʊ | u |
| Mid | e | ɛ | ɔ | o |
| Low | a | |||
There are up to 34 consonant phonemes in the language, including implosive stops, prenasalized stops, and labialized consonants. The language uses two levels of contrastive tone.
A prominent feature of Tangale is vowel harmony. Suffixes control whether all the vowels in a word are open or close.[1]