Kiowa Language - Sounds

Sounds

The 23 consonants of Kiowa:

		Bilabial	Dental	Alveolar	Palatal	Velar	Glottal
Plosive and affricate		b	d			ɡ
		p	t	ts		k	ʔ
		pʰ	tʰ			kʰ
		pʼ	tʼ	tsʼ		kʼ
Fricative				s			h
				z
Nasal		m	n
Approximant		(w)	l		j

Kiowa distinguishes six vowel qualities, with three distinctive levels of height and a front-back contrast. All six vowels may be long or short, oral or nasal. Four of the vowels occurs as diphthongs with a high front off-glide of the form vowel + /j/.

The 24 Kiowa vowels:

Contrasts among the consonants are easily demonstrated with an abundance of minimal and near-minimal pairs. There are no contrasts between the presence of initial glottal stops and its absence.

The ejective and aspirated stops are articulated forcefully. The unaspirated voiceless stops are tense, while the voiced stops are lax.

The voiceless alveolar fricative /s/ is pronounced before /y/

The lateral /l/ is realized as in syllable-initial position, as lightly affricated in syllable-final position and slightly devoiced in utterance-final position. It occurs seldomly in word-initial position.

The dental resonants /l/ and /n/ are palatalized before /i/.

All consonants may begin a syllable but /l/ may not occur word-initially. The only consonants which may terminate a syllable are /p,t,m,n,l,y/.

Certain sequences of consonant and vowel do not occur: dental and alveolar obstruents preceding /i/ (tʼi, tʰi, ti, di, kʼi, ki, si, zi). Velars and /y/ preceding /e/ (kʼe, kʰe, ke, ge, ye).

The glide /y/ automatically occurs between all velars and /a/.

Nasalization of voiced stops operates automatically only within the domain of the pronominal prefixes: voiced stops become the corresponding nasals either preceding or following a nasal. The velar nasal that is derived from /g/ is deleted; there is no /ŋ/ in Kiowa.

Underlying /ia/ surfaces in alternating forms as /ya/ following velars, as /a/ following labials and as /i:/ if accompanied by falling tone.

Obstruents are devoiced in two environments: in syllable-final position and following a voiceless obsturent. Voiced stops are devoiced in syllable-final position without exception. In effect, the rule applies only to /b/ and /d/ since velars are prohibited in final position.

The palatal glide /y/ spreads across the laryngeals /h/ and /ʔ/, yielding a glide onset, a brief moment of coarticulation and a glide release. The laryngeals /h/ and /ʔ/ are variably deleted between sonorants. This also applies across a word boundary.