Chilcotin sounds

Consonants
Chilcotin has 47 consonants:


 * Like many Athabaskan languages, Chilcotin does not have a contrast between fricatives and approximants.
 * The alveolar series is pharyngealized.
 * Dentals and alveolars:
 * Both Krauss (1975) and Cook (1993) describe the dental and alveolar as being essentially identical in articulation&mdash;postdental&mdash;with the only differentiating factor being their different behaviours in the vowel flattening processes (described below).
 * Gafos (1999, personal communication with Cook) describes the dental series as apico-laminal denti-alveolar and the alveolar series as lamino-postalveolar.

Vowels
Chilcotin has 6 vowels:


 * Chilcotin has both tense and lax vowel phonemes. Additionally, tense vowels may become lax due a vowel laxing process (see below).

Every given Chilcotin vowel will have a number of different phonetic realizations due to complex phonological processes (e.g. nasalization, laxing, flattening). For instance, the vowel can be variously pronounced.

Tone
Chilcotin is a tonal language with two tones:


 * high tone
 * low tone

Phonological processes
Chilcotin has a number of interesting phonological processes, namely vowel flattening and consonant harmony. Consonant harmony (i.e. sibilant harmony) is rather common in the Athabaskan language family. Vowel flattening, though unique to Chilcotin, is similar to phonological processes in other unrelated Interior Salishan languages spoken in the same area, such as Shuswap, St'át'imcets, and Thompson River Salish (and thus was probably borrowed into Chilcotin). This type of harmony is an areal feature common in this region of North America. The Chilcotin processes, however, are much more complicated.

Vowel nasalization and laxing
Vowel nasalization is a phonological process where the phoneme is realized as nasalization on the preceding vowel. This process occurs when the vowel + sequence is followed by a (tautosyllabic) continuant consonant (e.ɡ. ).

Vowel laxing is a process where tense vowels (i.e. ) become lax when followed by a syllable-final (i.e. the tense and lax distinction is neutralized).

Vowel flattening
Chilcotin has a type of Retracted Tongue Root harmony (or post-velar harmony) called Vowel Flattening. Generally, "flat" consonants lower vowels in both directions, i.e. the assimilation is both progressive and regressive.

Chilcotin consonants can be grouped into three categories: Neutral, Sharp, and Flat.


 * Flat consonants trigger vowel flattening.
 * Sharp consonants block vowel flattening.
 * Neutral consonants do not affect vowel flattening in any way.

The flat consonants can be further divided into two types:


 * 1) a -series (i.e.  etc.), and
 * 2) a -series (i.e.  etc.).

The '-series is stronger than the '-series in that the -series affects vowels for a greater distance across the word.

The table below shows both unaffected vowels and flattened vowels.

The vowel surfaces as  if preceded by a flat consonant and as  if followed by a flat consonant:

Below the progressive and regressive flattening processes are described below in separate sections.

Progressive flattening
In the progressive (left-to-right) flattening, the -series consonants affect only the immediately following vowel:

Like the '-series, the stronger '-series consonants affects the immediately following vowel. However, this series additionally affects the vowel in the following syllable, if the first flattened vowel is a lax vowel. If the first flattened is tense, then the vowel of the following syllable is not flattened.

As can be seen above, the neutral consonants are "transparent" in the flattening process. In the first word 'he's comatose',  flattens the  of the first syllable to  and the  of the second syllable to. In the word 'I'm sleeping',  flattens  to. But since the vowel of the first syllable is which is a tense vowel, the  cannot flatten the  of the second syllable.

The sharp consonants, however, block the progressive flattening caused by the -series:

Regressive flattening
In regressive (right-to-left) harmony, the -series flattens the preceding vowel (just like it does in the progressive harmony mentioned above).

The regressive (right-to-left) harmony of the -series, however, is much stronger than in the progressive harmony. Here these consonants flatten all preceding vowels in a word:

Both progressive and regressive flattening processes occur in Chilcotin words: