Consonants[]
The phonemic inventory of the consonants is written by using the orthography used by Kopris in his analysis, which was based on Barbeau's transcriptions. The International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) symbol is written in parentheses afterward whenever it differs from the orthography. Kopris listed places of articulation for the consonants but noted that the distinction had not been made by Barbeau.
| Labial | Alveolar | Post- alveolar |
Palatal | Velar | Glottal | ||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Nasal | m | n | ɲ | ŋ | |||||||
| Plosive | p | b | t | d | c | j (ɟ) | k | ɡ | ʔ | ||
| Affricate | ts | ||||||||||
| Trill | v (ʙ) | r (ɹ) | |||||||||
| Fricative | f | l (v) | s | z | š (ʃ) | ž (ʒ) | x | ɣ | h | ||
| Approximant | y (j) | w | |||||||||
(m) is placed in parentheses because it appears as an allophone of /w/ in nearly all cases, but that cannot always explain its presence. The presence of a single voiced stop, /d/, contrasting with the voiceless stop /t/, makes Wyandot unusual among Iroquoian languages, as it is the only one with a phonemic voicing distinction.[1] The /r/ sound is pronounced as [ɹ] rather than [r], according to researchers who phonetically transcribed directly from fluent speakers and described it as "corresponding to the English r"[2] and as "the smooth English sound, never vibrant."[3] The Wyandot /d/ and /n/ are both cognate with /n/ in other Northern Iroquoian languages. Although it could be argued that the two are in free variation, they clearly sometimes contrast, as in the minimal pairs da "that; the; who") and na ("now; then"). The ambiguity of the relationship between /d/ and /n/ seems to indicate that the two were in the process of a phonemic split that was not yet complete by the early 20th century.[4]
Another unique feature of Wyandot is the presence of the voiced fricative /ž/, creating an /š ž/ contrast, but there is no corresponding /s z/ contrast.[5] The phoneme /k/ also has no voiced counterpart.
Consonants may appear in clusters. Word-initial consonant clusters can be up to three consonants long, medial clusters up to four consonants long, and final clusters up to two consonants long.[6]
Vowels[]
Barbeau's original transcriptions contained great detail and a complex system of diacritics, resulting in 64 different vowel characters. By eliminating allophones, Kopris found six phonemes, in addition to the marginal phoneme /ã/.
| Front | Central | Back | |||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| High | i | ø (y) | ɨ | ɯ | u |
| Mid-high | e | ɵ | o | ||
| Mid-low | ɛ̃ | œ | ɞ | ɔ̃ | |
| Low | æ | a | ɑ | ||
Other analysis of the same Barbeau data suggests that vowel length is contrastive in Wyandot, like in other Iroquoian languages.[7]