Ottawa Dialect - Phonology

Phonology

Ottawa has seventeen consonants and seven oral vowels; there are also long nasal vowels whose phonological status is unclear. In this article, Ottawa words are written in the modern orthography described below, with phonetic transcriptions in brackets using the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) as needed.

The most prominent feature of Ottawa phonology is vowel syncope, in which short vowels are deleted, or in certain circumstances reduced to schwa, when they appear in metrically defined weak syllables. Notable effects of syncope are:

1. Differences in pronunciation between Ottawa and other dialects of Ojibwe, resulting in a lower degree of mutual intelligibility.
2. Creation of new consonant clusters that do not occur in other dialects, through deletion of short vowels between two consonants.
3. Adjustments in the pronunciation of consonant sequences.
4. New forms of the person prefixes that occur on nouns and verbs.
5. Variability in the pronunciation of words that contain vowels subject to syncope, as speakers frequently have more than one way of pronouncing them.