Délįne, Sahtúgot’ıne (Bear Lake, North Slavey)  "Where the water flows", is spoken in Délįne, which is located on Keiths Arm of Great Bear Lake in the Sahtu region. The examples in this site are from the two consultants in Délįne.

Orthography  The sounds of Sahtúgot’ıne (North Slavey) written in the spelling system in current use, and in the International Phonetic Alphabet.

In the these two sections the consonant and vowel sounds of Sahtúgot’ıne (North Slavey) are exemplified in words, with sounds files and descriptions of each of the sounds.

Consonants

The consonant sounds in a language are divided into two groups, obstruents and sonorants. The obstruents are comprised of the stops, fricatives and affricates. The obstruents are the largest group in the inventory of Dene Sųłiné sounds.

The second group is called sonorants. The sonorants or approximants are a smaller group consisting mainly of the nasals and the y and w and sounds. Sonornant sounds are voiced.

These are the sounds listed in the chart on the sidebar. To hear a word that demonstrates a particular sound, click on the sound in the sidebar.

For the charts the North Slavey sounds in the community orthography and in the IPA, see the Orthography for North Slavey Délįne.

Vowels

There are five vowel qualities in North Slavey, and the vowels may contrast in tone (high or low), 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 both the stem and prefix vowel tokens plotted together. In the individual tokens, there is considerable overlap between the vowels, the mid front vowel has an especially broad distribution in the vowel space. This may be an effect of plotting the stem and prefix vowels together. In future editions we will present the stems vowels separately from the prefix vowels, as we find that the stem vowels tend to be longer and somewhat more carefully articulated.

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

 
SP5 Vowel Space

 
A plot of the individual vowel tokens

7/4/14