Kabardian phonology

Many speakers of Kabardian, like many of Adyghe, pronounce some of the ejective consonants as pharyngealized ejectives or as pharyngealized pulmonic consonants. The phoneme written Л л can be pronounced or. In the Kabardian dialect, there are labiodental fricatives, which correspond to and  in Adyghe; for example, the Kabardian word зэвы /zavə/ "narrow" and фыз /fəz/ "wife" pronounced зэжъу /zaʒʷə/ and шъуз /ʃʷəz/ in standard Adyghe. Unlike the Adyghe, Kabardian lost many of the consonants that existed in the Proto-Circassian language, for example the consonants /ʃʷʼ/ /ʒʷ/ /ʃʷ/ /ʐ/ /ʂ/ /t͡sʷ/ /d͡zʷ/ became /fʼ/ /v/ /f/ /ʑ/ /ɕ/ /f/ /v/. Kabardian has an labialized voiceless velar fricative [xʷ] which correspond to Adyghe [f], for example the Adyghe word "тфы" ( "five" is тху in Kabardian. In the Beslenei dialect (one of the East Circassian languages), there exist an alveolar lateral ejective affricate [t͡ɬʼ] and a palatalized voiced velar stop [gʲ] which corresponds to  and  in literary Kabardian. The Turkish Kabardians have a palatalized voiced velar stop [gʲ] and a voiceless palatal fricative [ç] which corresponds to  and  in literary Kabardian.

Consonants
The glottalization of the ejective plosives (but not fricatives) can be quite weak, and has been reported to often be creaky voice, that is, to have laryngealized voicing. Something similar seems to have happened historically in the Veinakh languages.

Vowels
Kabardian consists of a vertical vowel system. Although a large number of surface vowels appear, they can be analyzed as consisting of at most the following three phonemic vowels: /ə/, /a/ and /aː/.

The following allophones of the short vowels /ǝ/, /a/ appear:

According to Kuipers,
 * These symbols must be understood as each covering a wide range of sub-variants. For example, i stands for a sound close to cardinal [i] in 'ji' "eight", for a sound close to English  in "kit" in the word x'i "sea", etc.  In fact, the short vowels, which are found only after consonants, have different variants after  practically every series defined as to point of articulation and presence or absence of labialization or palatalization, and the number of variants is multiplied by the influence of the consonant (or zero) that follows.

Most of the long vowels appear as automatic variants of a sequence of short vowel and glide, when it occurs in a single syllable:
 * = /ǝw/
 * = /aw/
 * = /ǝj/
 * = /aj/

This leaves only the vowel. Kuipers claims that this can be analyzed as underlying /ha/ when word-initial, and underlying /ah/ elsewhere, based on the following facts:
 * /h/ occurs only in the plural suffix [ha], which does not occur word-initially.
 * is the only word-initial vowel; analyzing it as /ha/ makes the language underlyingly universally consonant-initial.
 * Certain complications involving stress and morphophonemic alternations are dramatically simplified by these assumptions.

Halle finds Kuipers' analysis "exemplary". Gordon and Applebaum note this analysis, but also note that some authors disagree, and as a result prefer to maintain a phoneme.

In a later section of his monograph, Kuipers also attempts to analyze the two vowels phonemes /ǝ/ and /a/ out of existence. Halle, however, shows that this analysis is flawed, as it requires the introduction of multiple new phonemes to carry the information formerly encoded by the two vowel phonemes.

The vowel /o/ appears in some loan words; it is often pronounced /aw/.

The diphthong /aw/ is pronounced /oː/ in some dialects. /jə/ may be realised as /iː/, /wə/ as /uː/ and /aj/ as /eː/. This monothongisation does not occur in all dialects.

The vowels /a, aː/ can have the semi-vowel /j/ in front of it.