Moksha phonology

Due to the extensive use of its agglutinative morphology, Moksha words can be quite long.

The main stress is always on the first syllable. Stress does not cause any measurable modifications in vowel quality. However, stress is not strong and words may appear evenly stressed.

Other grammatical features of Moksha include a lack of gender and vowel harmony, like most Uralic languages.

Vowels
There are eight vowels, whose lexical and grammatical role is highly important, and which are unusually strictly controlled, so that there is almost no allophony. These are always different phonemes in the initial syllable; for non-initial syllable, see morphophonology below. Moksha has lost its original system of vowel harmony.

Consonants
There are 33 consonants in Moksha.

may be realized also as a sibilant in certain dialects.

Palatalization, characteristic of Uralic languages, is contrastive for alveolar consonants. Before the front vowels, all other consonants have palatalized allophones as well. There is also a palatalized postalveolar affricate, which lacks a corresponding non-palatalized affricate, but the postalveolar fricatives lack palatalized counterparts.

Devoicing
Unusually for a Uralic language, there is also a series of voiceless liquid consonants:. These have arisen from Proto-Mordvinic consonant clusters of a sonorant followed by a voiceless stop of affricate: *p, *t⁽ʲ⁾, *ts⁽ʲ⁾, *k.

Before certain inflectional and derivational endings, devoicing continues to exist as a phonological process in Moksha. This affects all other voiced consonants as well, including the nasal consonants and semivowels. No voiceless nasals are however found in Moksha: the devoicing of nasals produces voiceless oral stops. Altogether the following devoicing processes apply:

E.g. before the nominative plural /-t⁽ʲ⁾/:
 * кал 'fish' > калхт /kal̥t/ 'fishes'
 * лем 'name' > лепть /lʲeptʲ/ 'names'