Upper Arrernte phonology

Consonants
is described as velar by, and as uvular  by.

Stops are unaspirated. Prenasalized stops are voiced throughout; prestopped nasals are voiceless during the stop. These sounds arose as normal consonant clusters; Ladefoged states that they now occur initially, where consonant clusters are otherwise forbidden, due to historical loss of initial vowels; however, it has also been argued that such words start with a phonemic schwa, which may not be pronounced (see below).

Vowels
All dialects have at least.

The vowel system of Arrernte is unusual in that there are only two contrastive vowel phonemes, and. Two-vowel systems are very rare worldwide, but are also found in some Northwest Caucasian languages. It seems that the vowel system derives from an earlier one with more phonemes, but after the development of labialized consonants in the vicinity of round vowels, the vowels lost their roundedness/backness distinction, merging into just two phonemes. There is no allophonic variation in different consonantal contexts for the vowels. Instead, the phonemes can be realized by various different articulations in free variation. For example, the phoneme can be pronounced  in any context.

Phonotactics
The underlying syllable structure of Arrernte is argued to be VC(C), with obligatory codas and no onsets. Underlying phrase-initial is realised as zero, except before a rounded consonant where, by a rounding process of general applicability, it is realised as. It is also common for phrases to carry a final corresponding to no underlying segment.

Among the evidence for this analysis is that some suffixes have suppletive variants for monosyllabic and bisyllabic bases. Stems that appear monosyllabic and begin with a consonant in fact select the bisyllabic variant. Stress falls on the first nucleus preceded by a consonant, which by this analysis can be stated more uniformly as the second underlying syllable. And the frequentative is formed by reduplicating the final VC syllable of the verb stem; it does not include the final.

Orthography
Arrernte orthography does not write word-initial, and adds an e to the end of every word.