Vowels
Navajo has four contrastive vowel qualities at three different vowel heights (high, mid, low) and a front-back contrast between the mid vowels . There are also two contrastive vowel lengths and a contrast in nasalization. This results in 16 phonemic vowels, shown below.
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There is a phonetic vowel quality difference between the long high vowel /iː/ (orthographic ii) and the short high vowel /i/ (orthographic i): the shorter vowel is significantly lower at than its long counterpart. This phonetic difference is salient to native speakers, who will consider a short vowel at a higher position to be a mispronunciation. Similarly, short /e/ is pronounced . Short /o/ is a bit more variable and more centralized, covering the space ~ . Notably, the variation in /o/ does not approach, which is a true gap in the vowel space.
Although the nasalization is contrastive in the surface phonology, many instances of nasalized vowels can be derived from a sequence of Vowel + Nasal consonant in a more abstract analysis. Additionally, there are alternations between long and short vowels that are predictable.
There have been a number of somewhat different descriptions of Navajo vowels, which are conveniently summarized in McDonough (2003).
Read more about this topic: Navajo Phonology
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