Acehnese, the language spoken by the
Acehnese people of
Aceh, Indonesia, has a large
vowel
A vowel is a syllabic speech sound pronounced without any stricture in the vocal tract. Vowels are one of the two principal classes of speech sounds, the other being the consonant. Vowels vary in quality, in loudness and also in quantity (leng ...
inventory compared to
Indonesian
Indonesian is anything of, from, or related to Indonesia, an archipelagic country in Southeast Asia. It may refer to:
* Indonesians, citizens of Indonesia
** Native Indonesians, diverse groups of local inhabitants of the archipelago
** Indonesian ...
, with ten oral
monophthong vowels, twelve oral
diphthong
A diphthong ( ; , ), also known as a gliding vowel, is a combination of two adjacent vowel sounds within the same syllable. Technically, a diphthong is a vowel with two different targets: that is, the tongue (and/or other parts of the speech o ...
s, seven
nasal
Nasal is an adjective referring to the nose, part of human or animal anatomy. It may also be shorthand for the following uses in combination:
* With reference to the human nose:
** Nasal administration, a method of pharmaceutical drug delivery
** ...
monophthong vowels, and five nasal diphthongs.
Vowels
Native-speaking linguists divide vowels in Acehnese into several categories: oral monophthongs, oral diphthongs (which are further divided into the ones ending with /ə/ and with /i/), nasal monophthongs, and nasal diphthongs.
Oral vowels
Oral monophthong vowels in Acehnese are shown in the table below.
Oral diphthong vowels ending with /ə/ are shown in the table below.
Oral diphthong vowels ending with /i/ are shown in the table below.
Nasal vowels
Nasal monophthong vowels in Acehnese are shown in the table below.
Consonants
The table below shows the Acehnese consonant phonemes and the range of their realizations.
Notes:
*Syllable-final k always represents /ʔ/ save in certain recent loans
*/f/, /z/, and /ʃ/ are borrowed sounds, and are often replaced by /ph/, /d/, and /ch/ respectively
*The nasals are realized as
post-stopped nasal
Prenasalized consonants are phonetics, phonetic sequences of a nasal consonant, nasal and an obstruent (or occasionally a non-nasal sonorant such as ) that behave phonology, phonologically like single consonants. The primary reason for considering ...
s (also called "funny nasals") before oral vowels and consonants. They are distinct from the nasal-stop sequences , e.g. in 'port' vs 'all'.
[Long & Maddieson (1993) "Consonantal evidence against Quantal Theory", ''UCLA Working Papers in Phonetics'' 83, p. 144.] The orthography does not distinguish these sounds.
Orthography
The
orthography
An orthography is a set of conventions for writing a language, including norms of spelling, hyphenation, capitalization, word breaks, emphasis, and punctuation.
Most transnational languages in the modern period have a writing system, and mos ...
of Achenese features 31 letters: the 26 letters of the
basic Latin alphabet, è, é, ë, ô, and ö.
Notes
References
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{{Language phonologies
Acehnese language
Austronesian phonologies