Supyire phonology

Consonants
Supyire has a voicing distinction and contains a glottal stop, a common characteristic in African languages. However, it does not have labial–velar consonants.

Voiceless stops have particular limitations and are only used in three environments: word initial, such as tàcw?` (“fiancée”); medially in a stressed syllable, as in nupéé; or following a nasal, such as in kàntugo (“behind”). Moreover, almost every word-initial is found in loanwords from either French or Bambara.

Although both voiceless and voiced fricatives are found, voiceless fricatives such as and  are much more common than the voiced fricatives, , and.

There is no labial approximant.

In speech, does not come after a short stressed syllable.

Although Supyire contains nasal consonants, there is considerable debate over their phonemic status. According to a well-formulated hypothesis, the predecessor of Supyire had no nasal consonants but nasalized vowels did exist. Some linguists thus categorize nasal consonants as simple variants of the approximants that occur before nasal vowels.

Supyire is reported to have the rare uvular flap as an allophone of in unstressed syllables. This parallels surfacing as  in the same environment.

Vowels
Supyire has 12 vowels in total, with seven oral vowels and five nasal vowels. Two oral vowels, /?/ and /?/ are not as well-established as the other five because the difference between /?/ and /a/ is neutralized and, when speaking quickly, it is very difficult to distinguish between /?/, a variant of /?/, and /a/. It does appear that some speakers preferentially choose one pronunciation over the other, although some do use both pronunciations and some use a variant somewhere in the middle.

Vowel harmony is also important in the Supyire language. This is done by harmonizing unstressed vowels with the initial stressed vowel if they both belong to the same root or have the same suffix.

Syllables
Supyire has a noticeable syllable structure that includes no closed syllables. In Supyire, syllables are most often either CV or CVV although the pronouns u and uru both begin with a vowel syllable. Supyire words also tend to have only one stressed syllable in every root. Stress is most often placed on the initial syllable of a root although many roots exist with no stress on the first syllable. Affixes and other grammatical sounds, such as those that indicate pronouns, do not have stress.

Tone
Supyire is tonal (common in African languages).

The language has four basic tones: high, low, strong mid, and weak mid. While the high and low tones are unremarkable, the two mid tones are only differentiated by differences in their behavior when referencing tone rules, and not by their pitch. These unusual mid tones are found in all northern Senufo languages but not in central Senufo languages, which only have three tones.

Most vowels in the Supyire language contain a single tone although vowels may have two, or in extremely rare cases three, tones. Further, nasals that come before stops can only have one tone. Basic noun gender suffixes, imperfective verb suffixes, the causative verb suffix –g followed by a vowel, and the intransitive verb prefix N- are considered toneless.

It was noted that boys who spent their days herding cows communicated with each other strictly through whistled language, which only elaborated vowel length and pitch. These small pieces of information were enough to have conversations of considerable detail.