Western Desert phonology

In the following tables of the WDL sound system, symbols in boldface give a typical practical orthography used by many WDL communities. Further details of orthographies in use in different areas is given below. Phonetic values in IPA are shown in [square brackets].

Vowels
The Western Desert Language has the common (for Australia) three-vowel system with a length distinction creating a total of six possible vowels.

Consonants
As shown in the chart, the WDL distinguishes five positions of articulation, and has oral and nasal occlusives at each position. The stops have no phonemic voice distinction, but display voiced and unvoiced allophones; stops are usually unvoiced at the beginning of a word, and voiced elsewhere. In both positions they are usually unaspirated. There are no fricative consonants.