Jicarilla phonology

Consonants
Jicarilla has 34 consonants:


 * What has developed into in Jicarilla corresponds to  and  in other Southern Athabaskan languages (e.g. Navajo and Chiricahua).

Aspirated Stops
The consonant //, occurring in most other Athabaskan languages, only occurs alone in a few forms in Jicarilla and has mostly merged with //. This consequently has made most of the aspirated stops in Jicarilla velar.

Fricatives and Approximants

 * [w] and [] are allophones of //.
 * [] is an allophone of //.

Nasals

 * /m/ is never found word-finally and its most frequent position is in prefixes.
 * /n/: See section on Syllabic /n/.

Syllabic /n/ in Jicarilla
The consonant /n/ can appear as a syllable and bear a high or low tone, but not a falling tone. High-toned /ń/ actually represents an underlying syllable, /nÍ/. There are four possible contours for Vowel-/n/ and /n/-/n/ combinations: Low-high, High-low, High-high, and Low-low. The contours are illustrated in the following table:

(Modified from Tuttle & Sandoval 2002, p. 109)

/n/ may occur between /t/, //, or /n/ and any stem-initial consonant, but when /n/ occurs alone before a stem-initial consonant, it forms a syllable of its own. When preceded by another prefix consonant, /n/ may or may not be judged to form a syllable by native speakers of Jicarilla.

Vowels
Jicarilla has 16 vowels:

All vowels may be


 * oral or nasal
 * short or long

The long high front oral vowel is phonetically higher than its nasal and short counterparts ( vs. ). The short back vowel is higher than its long and nasal counterparts ( vs. ). The short low vowel is higher than its long and nasal counterparts ( vs. ).

Nasal vowels are indicated by underlining in the Jicarilla orthography.


 * There are oral and nasal versions of each vowel, but not all combinations of vowel quality, nasality, and tone are possible.

Tone
Jicarilla has three different tones: high, low, and falling.

High tone is indicated with an acute accent. Low tone is unmarked. Falling tone is indicated by a sequence of acute-accented vowel and an unmarked vowel.


 * high tone: tsé (rock), dééh (tea)
 * low tone: ts’e 'sagebush', jee 'pitch'
 * falling tone: zháal (money), ha’dáonáa (how?)

Syllable Structure
Syllables may be constructed as CV, CVC, or CV:C (C – Consonant; V – Vowel) depending on the morphology of a sequence. Onset may be any consonant, but coda consonants are limited to //, /l/, //, //, /h/, /s/and /n/.

Syllable Duration
A study of the durational effects of Jicarilla Apache show that morphology and prosody both affect and determine the durational realization of consonants and syllables. It was found that in a recording of a passage read by native speakers stem, suffix, and particle syllables were found to be longer than prefix syllables, but there is not enough a distinction to see difference in duration. Syllables at the end of phrases were lengthened differently from syllables lengthened because of stress; this is in regards to a ratio of onset lengthening to rhyme lengthening. This study was only a beginning to analysis of Apachean language prosody.