Chara phonology

Consonants
[p] and [f] are in free variation. /ɗ/ only occurs in the word /jalɗa~jaltʼa/ 'crooked'. Yilma (2002) found /ɓ/ to occur five times in around 550 lexical items. He also found /ʑ/ occurring in two, both in the sequence /iʑa/. Occurrence of /ɗ/ and /pʼ/ may be governed by dialectual variation.

Vowels
/a/ is realized as [ə] in unstressed word-medial syllables.

Length is minimally contrastive. Minimal pairs include /mola/ 'fish', /moːla/ 'egg'; /masa/ 'to wash', /maːsa/ 'leopard'; /buna/ 'flower', /buːna/ 'coffee'.

Suprasegmentals
Chara has phonemic stress. Examples: /ˈbakʼa/ 'to slap', /baˈkʼa/ 'empty'; /ˈwoja/ 'to come', /woˈja/ 'wolf'.

Morphophonemics
Morpheme-initial nasals assimilate point of articulation to that of the preceding consonant, usually found when verbs are suffixed with the singular imperative morpheme /-na/, e.g. /dub-na/ 'to hit.imp' → [dubma] 'hit!'.