Orthography of North Slavey

A phoneme inventory of the North Slavey dialects is presented below. All North Slavey dialects do not have all the sounds presented in these tables, and some of them may be rare, or particular to a North Slavey community. In the tables on this page, in bold on the left is the phoneme in contemporary North Slavey orthography; next to it is the IPA equivalent.

Consonants

North Slavey has approximately thirty-eight consonant phonemes, depending on dialect. These are presented in Table 1 below.

Table 1: North Slavey Consonants

		Bilabial	Interdental	Alveolar	Lateral	Palato-alveolar	Velar	Glottal
Nasal		m [m]		n [n]
Stop	Nasalized	mb [mb]		nd [nd]
	Unaspirated	b [p]		d [t]			g [k]	ʼ [ʔ]
	Velar Affrication			t [tx]			k [kx]
	Ejective			tʼ [tʼ]			kʼ [kʼ]
Affricate	Voiced		ddh [tθ]	dz [ts]	dl [tɬ]	j [tʃ]
	Aspirated		tth [tθ^h]	ts [ts^h]	tłʼ [tɬ^h]	ch [tʃ^h]
	Ejective		tth [tθʼ]	tsʼ [tsʼ]	tłʼ [tɬʼ]	chʼ [tʃʼ]
Fricative	Voiceless		θ [th]	s [s]	ł [ɬ]	sh [ʃ]	x [x]	h [h]
Fricative	Voiced		ð [dh]	z [z]	l [l]	zh [ʒ]	gh [ɣ]
Resonant				r [ɹ]		y [j]	w [w]

In the Dene languages that we have studied, the stops t and k are affricates [tx] and [kx], rather than plain aspirated stops. Only the affricates tth [tθʰ], ts [tsʰ], tł [tɬʰ], and ch [tʃʰ] are truly aspirated.

Vowels

The North Slavey dialects have five or six vowel qualities. All six of these are shown in Table 2 below; however, in the rest of the DSA, the distinction between ə [e] and e [ɛ] is not marked orthographically, and both of these sounds are represented by the symbol e.

Table 2: North Slavey Vowels

	Front	Back
High	i [i]	u [u]
Mid-high	ə [e]	o [o]
Mid-low	e [ɛ]
Low	a [ɑ]

The vowels may further contrast in tone (high versus low), and nasality (oral versus nasal) and length (long versus short). These contrasts are generally found only in stems, and minimal pairs are not always available. The vowel length contrast is especially hard to see in the data; besides a possible phonemic length contrast, stem vowels in general tend to be longer than non-stem vowels. To our knowledge, the vowel length contrast is not present in all North Slavey dialects.

The orthography of North Slavey shows nasality and tone contrasts using diacritics over vowels. These diacritics are exemplified below. The North Slavey dialects are 'high tone marked' languages; this means that the orthographic 'default' tone is low and is not marked; high tones are marked with an acute accent.

ą nasal vowel
á high tone (low tone is unmarked)
ą́ high tone nasal vowel

Sources

2018-08-06