Tiwi phonology

Consonants
As do most Australian languages, Tiwi has four phonetically distinct series of coronal stops. (See Coronals in Indigenous Australian languages.) There are contrasting alveolar and postalveolar apical consonants, the latter often called retroflex. However, the two laminal series are in complementary distribution, with postalveolar laminal (sometimes described as alveolo-palatal) occurring before the front vowel, and denti-alveolar laminal  occurring before the non-front vowels,. That is, phonologically Tiwi has at most three series. However, some analyses treat postalveolar as a sequence, since it only occurs in medial position.

In addition, Tiwi has a velar approximant, which is somewhat unusual for an Australian language. Typically for an Australian language, there are no fricatives.

Tiwi allows consonant clusters in medial position. Besides the possibility of for, these include other liquid-stop clusters and nasal-stop clusters such as. However there is little reason to choose between an analysis of as being a cluster as opposed to a prenasalized stop.

There is also a glottal stop in the inventory of speech sounds in Tiwi, but as Osborne notes, it functions to mark the end of a sentence and as such, is best analysed as a part of Tiwi prosody.

Vowels
Tiwi has four phonemic vowels. The frequency of the open-back vowel is relatively low. It is neutralised with following, and it doesn't occur initially or finally. However minimal pairs exist, albeit few in number, to prove its existence as a distinct phoneme:
 * /jilati/ knife
 * /jiloti/ forever

Each phonemic vowel exhibits a broad range of allophones, many of which overlap with allophones of other vowels, and three vowels (, and ) reduce to  in many unstressed syllables. All vowels are phonemically short, while long vowels occur when medial glides are reduced. For example:
 * /paɻuwu/ [paɻu:] (placename)