Archi phonology

Archi has, like its Northeast Caucasian relatives, a very complicated phonological system, with Archi being an extreme example. It has 26 vowel phonemes and, depending on analysis, between 74 and 82 consonant phonemes.

Vowels
Archi has a symmetric six-vowel system. All except can occur in five varieties: short, pharyngealized, high tone, long (with high tone), and pharyngealized with high tone (e.g., , , , and ). Of all these, only and  do not occur word-initially. Examples of non-initial are  ('to be fat') and  ('brain').

Consonants
Of the languages without click consonants, Archi has one of the largest consonant inventories, with the recently extinct Ubykh of the Northwest Caucasian languages having a few more. The table below shows all consonants that can be found in the Archi Language Tutorial and the Archi Dictionary.

Of the consonants listed above, the ones in orange have no word-initial dictionary entries (even though, , and are relatively common), the one in green does not appear in the Tutorial but does have a word-internal dictionary entry (in , 'alpine pasture used in summer'), and the ones in blue appear in the Tutorial but have no dictionary entries.

Some of these sounds are very rare. For example, has only one dictionary entry word-internally (in, 'heavy') and two entries word-initially. Likewise, has only two dictionary entries:  ('blue; unripe') and  ('crooked, curved').

The fortis consonants are not simply two instances of the same consonant, though they do appear largely complementary, with the double instances, , and being the most common and  less so. That said, can still be found in  ('three'). This is also noted by, who describes the fortis consonants as follows: "'Strong phonemes are characterized by the intensiveness (tension) of the articulation. The intensity of the pronunciation leads to a natural lengthening of the duration of the sound, and that is why strong [consonants] differ from weak ones by greater length. [However,] the adjoining of two single weak sounds does not produce a strong one […] Thus, the gemination of a sound does not by itself create its tension.'"

The voiceless velar lateral fricative, the voiced velar lateral fricative , and the corresponding voiceless and ejective affricates , are extremely unusual speech sounds among the languages of the world, because velar fricatives are usually central rather than lateral. The velar laterals are further forward than velars in most languages and could better be called prevelar, like the Tutorial does.