Carrier phonology

Consonants
All dialects of Carrier have essentially the same consonant system, which is shown in this chart.

There are three series of stops and affricates: aspirated, unaspirated (written voiced in the practical orthography), and ejective.

is not native to the language but has been introduced by loans from French and English. occurs in a single loanword "coffee". The labialized voiced velar fricative is found only in the speech of the most conservative speakers; for most speakers it has merged with. The palatal nasal occurs allophonically before other palatal consonants; otherwise, it occurs only in a small set of 2nd-person singular morphemes. For most speakers it has become an sequence, with a syllabic. Similarly, the velar nasal occurs allophonically before other velar consonants but is found distinctively in one or two morphemes in each dialect.

Carrier once had a dental/alveolar (or laminal/apical) distinction, attested in the earliest grammatical treatise of the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century. However, by 1976 this had been leveled to the present alveolar series among younger speakers, and in 1981 the dental/laminal series (marked by underlining the consonant) was said to be found in only the "very oldest speakers". Poser (2005) states that it is found in only the most conservative speech. In even the earliest description, there is evidence of the distinction being neutralized.

Vowels
Carrier has six surface-phonemic vowels: and. The first four are tense in open syllables and lax in closed syllables. The reduced vowel is quite variable in its realization: it approaches  immediately preceding  and approaches  when either or both adjacent consonants are laryngeal. Unlike in some related languages, there is no distinctive nasalization; that is, Carrier does not contrast oral and nasal vowels.

The great majority of instances of are predictable from the phonotactics, introduced in order to create an acceptable syllable structure. The remaining instances are all found in certain forms of the verb where the morphology requires some vowel to be present.

In most if not all dialects there are surface-phonemic distinctions of vowel length. However, all of the long vowels that create such distinctions are morphophonemically derived. There is no need to represent vowel length in lexical representations.

Tone
Carrier has a very simple tone system of the type often described as pitch accent—it is in fact very similar to the prototypical pitch-accent language, Japanese. In Carrier, a word may or may not have a tonic syllable. If it does not, the pitch rises gradually across the phonological word. If it does have a tonic syllable, then that syllable has a high pitch, the following syllable downsteps to a low pitch, and subsequent syllables until the end of the prosodic unit are also low pitched. Any syllable in the word may carry the accent; if it is the final syllable, then the first syllable of the following word is low pitched, even if it would otherwise be tonic. Representing this phonemic drop in pitch with the downstep symbol, there is a contrast between the surface tone following an unaccented word xoh "goose" compared with the accented word  "wolf":


 * "He sees the goose."
 * "He sees the goose."


 * "He sees the wolf."
 * "He sees the wolf."

However, after a tonic syllable, the high pitch of  "wolf" is lost:


 * "One wolf"
 * "One wolf"

Phonotactics
In general the Carrier syllable is maximally CVC. All consonants other than the extremely rare are found in syllable-initial position. The possible coda consonants, on the other hand, are restricted. All of the sonorants except for the extremely rare palatal nasal may occur in the coda, but of the obstruents only the pulmonic unaspirated series occur. Affricates are not found in the coda with the exception of a few instances of. Palatals are also absent from the coda.

Word-internally consonant clusters occur only at the juncture between two syllables. Tautosyllablic clusters are found only word-initially, where any of the onset consonants may be preceded by or.

Nasals at all points of articulation are syllabic word-initially preceding a consonant.