Orthography

The sounds of Dene Sųłiné written in the spelling system in current use, and in the International Phonetic Alphabet. To view place and manner of descriptions for these sounds, see the Inventory of Dene Sųłiné sounds. 

Links

Dene Sųłiné Dictionary, University of Alberta

Goddard-Ennow texts in P.E: Goddard (1912)  Analysis of Cold Lake Dialect, Chipewyan, Anthropological Papers of the American Museum of Natural History X(II):67-170 

Goddard-Ennow texts in Pliny Earle Goddard Chipewyan texts (1916). These texts were collected at Cold Lake in 1911 by P. E. Goddard working with Jean Bapstist Ennou.

Consonants

The consonant sounds in a language are divided into two groups. The largest group, called obstruents, are comprised of the stops, fricatives and affricates. These consonants are the largest group of sounds in the inventory of Dene Sųłiné. The Dene languages all have a rich set of obstruent sounds.

The second group is called sonorants. The sonorants are a smaller group consisting mainly of the nasals and the y and wsounds. They are voiced sounds and often show formant structure.

The sounds are listed on be sidebar, and on the orthography page. Click on the sound in the sidebar that you want to hear.

To view place and manner of descriptions for these sounds, see the Orthography for Dene Sųłiné Sounds.

Vowels

There are five vowel qualities in Dene Sųłine, and the vowels may contrast in tone (H or L) nasality (oral or nasal) and length (long or short). These contrasts are generally found only in the stems and minimal pairs are not always available. Vowel length especially is hard to determine. We have provided examples of the vowels that we have found in our data. We have plotted in the charts below the vowels space and the individual vowel tokens. These charts represent all the vowel tokens, both the stems and the prefixes. In these tokens, there is considerable overlap between the front and back vowels. In future editions we will present the stems vowels separately from the prefix vowels, as we find that the stem vowels are longer and somewhat more carefully articulated.

The L tones are unmarked, H tones are marked with a áccent.

Figure 1: SP9 Vowel space

Figure 2: Point labels

6/29/14