Araki phonology

Araki has a phonological inventory of 16 consonant phonemes and 5 vowels, which are shown in the following two tables:

Consonants
Araki has 16 consonants which generally appear at the beginning of a syllable, with some exceptions.

Only fluent speakers of Araki distinguish between the flap and the trill ; and only they can distinguish and pronounce the linguolabial consonants. 'Passive' users of the language replace these consonants either with bilabial consonants or alveolar consonants. Although many younger people claim to be able to speak Araki, they are usually passive users of the language, and therefore do not use linguolabial consonants.

Vowels
The vowel phonemes are:

Araki does not possess phonemic long vowels. Also, the language does not have phonemic diphthongs. However, strings of consecutive vowels are possible - indeed prevalent - in the language. In these cases, each vowel builds a separate syllable.

Syllable structure and stress
Most syllables in Araki are open (CV). Diachronic effects of word stress have led to the irregular loss of some syllables, and the creation of new phonotactic patterns of CVC and CCV, with many word-final consonants. Although a cluster of more than two consonants is impossible within a word, longer consonant clusters may appear in longer linguistic sequences.

Word stress in Araki normally falls on the penultimate syllable, at least when the last syllable of the word is of the form -(C)V. A secondary stress may be heard on every second syllable toward the left of the word. Stress is assigned only after the lexeme has received all its affixes to form the whole phonological word. A process of final high vowel deletion (which is common in Vanuatu languages) does not affect the stress rule.