Tajik phonology

Vowels
The table below lists the six vowel phonemes in standard, literary Tajik. Letters from the Tajik Cyrillic alphabet are given first, followed by IPA transcription. Local dialects frequently have more than the six seen below. The Tajik Cyrillic alphabet also contains the letter Ӣ ӣ, which is a [iː].


 * 1) The central vowel is replaced in the central and southern dialects by /u/.
 * 2) The open back vowel has varyingly been described as mid-back,, , and . It is analogous to standard Persian â/ﺁ (long a).

Consonants
The Tajik language contains 24 consonants and 16 of them are identical, except for their voicing, these contrastive pairs are: [б/п] [в/ф] [д/т] [з/с] [ж/ш] [ҷ/ч] [г/к] [ғ/х]. The table below lists the consonant phonemes in standard, literary Tajik. Letters from the Tajik Cyrillic alphabet are given first, followed by IPA transcription.

Word stress
Word stress generally falls on the first syllable in finite verb forms and on the last syllable in nouns and noun-like words. Examples of where stress does not fall on the last syllable are adverbs like: бале (bale, meaning "yes") and зеро (zero, meaning "because"). Stress also does not fall on enclitics, nor on the marker of the direct object.