Ainu phonology

Ainu syllables are CV(C), that is, they have an obligatory syllable onset and an optional syllable coda. There are few consonant clusters.

Vowels
There are five vowel sounds in Ainu:

Consonants
Plosives may be voiced  between vowels and after nasals. Both and  are realized as, and  becomes  before  and at the end of syllables. There is some variation among dialects; in the Sakhalin dialect, syllable-final, , , lenited and merged into. After an, this is pronounced. A glottal stop is often inserted at the beginning of words, before an accented vowel, but is non-phonemic.

There is a pitch accent system. The accentuation of specific words varies somewhat from dialect to dialect. Generally, words including affixes have a high pitch on the stem, or on the first syllable if it is closed or has a diphthong, while other words have the high pitch on the second syllable, although there are exceptions to this generalization.