Luiseño phonology

Vowels
Luiseño has five vowel phonemes.

Variants
For some native speakers recorded in The Sparkman Grammar of Luiseño, the allophones and  are free variants of  and  respectively. However, other speakers do not use these variants. Sparkman records fewer than 25 Luiseño words with either or. For one of these words (ixíla “a cough”) the pronunciations and  are both recorded.

Unstressed freely varies with. Likewise, unstressed and  are free variants.

Vowel syncope
Vowels are often syncopated when attaching certain affixes, notably the possessive prefixes no- “my”, cham- “our”, etc. Hence polóv “good”, but o-plovi “your goodness”; kichum “houses” (nominative case), but kichmi “houses” (accusative case).

Vowel length
Luiseño distinguishes vowel length quantitatively. Luiseño vowels have three lengths.


 * Short: The basic vowel length. In writing, this is the standard value of a given vowel, e.g. $⟨a⟩$.
 * Long: The vowel is held twice as long but with no change in quality. In writing, a long vowel is often indicated by doubling it, e.g. $⟨aa⟩$.
 * Overlong: The vowel is held three times as long but with no change in quality. In writing, an overlong vowel is indicated by tripling it, e.g. $⟨aaa⟩$.

Overlong vowels are rare in Luiseño, typically reserved for absolutes, such as interjections, e.g.  aaashisha, roughly “haha!” (more accurately an exclamation of praise, joy or laughter).

Accent
A stress accent regularly falls on the first syllable of a word. In Luiseño, stress is fixed and is not contrastive.

Many orthographies mark irregular stress with an acute accent on the stressed syllable’s vowel, e.g. chilúy “speak Spanish”. In these systems, irregularly stressed long vowels either carry a written accent on both vowels or the first vowel only, e.g. koyóówut or koyóowut “whale”. Also, stress is not visually represented when it falls on the first syllable, e.g. hiicha “what”.

Another convention is to mark stress by underlining accented vowels, e.g. koy oo wut “whale”.

As a rule, the possessive prefixes are unstressed. The accent remains on the first syllable of the root word, e.g. nokaamay “my son” and never *nokaamay. One rare exception is the word  pó-ha “alone” (< po- “his/her/its” + ha “self”), whose invariable prefix and fixed accent suggests that it is now considered a single lexical item (compare noha “myself”, poha “him/herself”, etc.).

Consonants
Luiseño has a fairly rich consonant inventory.


 * and are found only in borrowed words, principally from Spanish and English.


 * Both and   are found in word initial position. However, only  occurs intervocalically, and only  is found preconsonantally and at word final position. Examples of these allophones in complementary distribution abound, such as ya’ásh ('man nom.') and ya’áchi ('man acc.').