Appendix:Kezhwa pronunciation

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The Kezhwa language has 21 consonants and 5 vowels.

Standard Romanization

Letter	IPA	English example	Notes
a	a/ə	father or sofa	[a] when stressed, [ə] otherwise
b	b	bog
d	d	dog
dh	ð	this
e	e/ɛ	gate or get	[ɛ] in closed syllables, [e] otherwise
f	f	fog
g	g	good
i	i	beet
k	k	skill	Always unaspirated
l	l	left
m	m	man
n	n	no
o	o/ɔ	tote or law	[ɔ] in closed syllables, [o] otherwise
p	p	span	Always unaspirated
r	ɾ	battle
s	s	see
sh	ʃ	shade
t	t	stop	Always unaspirated
th	θ	thing
u	u	rude
v	v	voice
w	w	wet
y	j	yet
z	z	zoo
zh	ʒ	azure
‘	ʔ	uh-oh

Phonetics

Consonants

		Labial	Coronal	Palatal	Velar	Glottal
Nasal		m /m/	n /n/
Plosive	voiceless	p /p/	t /t/		k /k/	' /ʔ/
	voiced	b /b/	d /d/		g /g/
Fricative	voiceless	f /f/	th /θ/, s /s/	sh /ʃ/
	voiced	v /v/	dh /ð/, z /z/	zh /ʒ/
Approximant		w /w/	l /l/	y /j/
Tap			r /ɾ/

Vowels

	Front	Central	Back
Close	i /i/		u /u/
Mid	e /e~ɛ/		o /o~ɔ/
Open		a /a~ə/

Stress

Kezhwa words are stressed on one of their last three syllabes, or, in other words, stress cannot fall on a syllable before the antepenultimate syllable. Most commonly, stress falls on the penultimate syllable, and in this case the stress is not marked in the romanization. This is especially true for native and/or grammatical terms. If the stress falls on the final syllable or the antepenult, it is marked in the romanization with an acute accent over the vowel. Especially in borrowed terms and (borrowed) compounds, stress may fall on a syllable other than the penult.

By default, a syllable of the root is stressed. Any syllable in the root may carry stress, and which syllable is stressed is unique to each root, i.e. lexical to some extent. In general, the head in the phrase takes the stress, at least for noun phrases. The main stress stays on the root when suffixes are added to it, unless it would end up falling before the antepenultimate syllable after suffixes are added. In that case, the stress is moved to the antepenult.

Clitics cannot take stress, and are written with a hyphen in the romanization. As such, they do not need to be taken into account when considering whether to indicate stress in the romanization by placing an acute accent.

Phonotactics

Kezhwa's syllabes have a (C)(A)V(C) structure, where the second consonant of a syllable-initial cluster must be an approximant (A). Kezhwa does not have diphthongs and does not allow vowel sequences within a word. Furthermore, geminates are not allowed, with all geminates in borrowings being reduced to single consonants.