Swahili phonology

Swahili is unusual among African languages in having lost the feature of lexical tone (with the exception of the numerically important Mvita dialect, the dialect of Kenya's second city, the Indian Ocean port of Mombasa).

Stress is on the penultimate syllable.

Vowels
Standard Swahili has five vowel phonemes:, , , , and. The pronunciation of the phoneme /u/ stands between International Phonetic Alphabet [u] and [o]. Vowels are never reduced, regardless of stress. The vowels are pronounced as follows:
 * is pronounced like the "a" in father
 * is pronounced like the "e" in bed
 * is pronounced like the "i" in ski
 * is pronounced like the "o" in cord
 * is pronounced like the "u" in rule.

Swahili has no diphthongs; in vowel combinations, each vowel is pronounced separately. Therefore, the Swahili word for "leopard", chui, is pronounced ; that is, as two syllables.

Consonants
Notes:
 * The nasal stops are pronounced as separate syllables when they appear before a heterorganic plosive (e.g. mtoto 'child') or represent a separate morpheme (e.g. nilimpiga  'I hit him'), and prenasalized stops are decomposed into two syllables when the word would otherwise have one (e.g. mbwa  'dog'). However, elsewhere this does not happen: ndizi ('banana') has two syllables,, as does nenda  (not ) 'go'.
 * The fricatives in parentheses, th dh kh gh, are borrowed from Arabic. Many Swahili speakers pronounce them as, respectively.
 * Swahili orthography does not distinguish aspirated from tenuis consonants. When nouns in the N-class begin with plosives, they are aspirated (tembo 'palm wine', but tembo  'elephant') in some dialects. Otherwise aspirated consonants are not common.  Some writers mark aspirated consonants with an apostrophe (t'embo).
 * Swahili l and r are merged for many speakers (the extent to which this is demonstrated generally depends on the original mother tongue spoken by the individual), and are often both realized as alveolar lateral flap, a sound between a flapped r and an l.
 * After a nasal prefix, l/r becomes and w becomes . (See fortition.)