Dahalo sounds

Consonants
Dahalo has, by all accounts, a large consonant inventory. 62 consonants are reported by Maddieson et al. (1993), whereas Tosco (1991) recognizes 50. The inventory according to the former is presented below:


 * 1 The dental clicks are most commonly written $\langle\rangle$. For legibility, the alternative letter $\langle\rangle$ is used here; this is found in a few sources such as Elderkin.
 * 2 If the palatals do not display properly, they can also be written $\langle\rangle$ and $\langle\rangle$.

Tosco's account differs in not including the labialized clicks, the palatal laterals, and the voiceless prenasalized consonants (on which see below), analyzing as, and adding ,  and  (which Maddieson et al. believe to be an allophone of ).

This typologically extraordinary inventory appears to result from extended contact influence from substratal and superstratal languages, due to long-running bilinguality. Only 27 consonants (shown in bold) are found in the final position of verbal stems, which Tosco suggests represents the inherited Cushitic component of the consonant inventory.

Several phonemes can be shown to be recent intrusions into the language through loanwords: Additionally, several consonants are marginal in their occurrence. Five are only attested in a single root: Less than five examples each are known of.
 * is only found in recent loans from Bantu and can be nativized as.
 * is only found in loanwords from Swahili.
 * is only found in loanwords from Swahili and Somali.
 * , in 'place where maize is seasoned'
 * , in 'centipede'
 * , in 'to pinch'.
 * , in 'mother'.
 * , in 'mother'.

The prenasalized voiceless stops have been analyzed as syllabic nasals plus stops by some researchers. However, one would expect this additional syllable to give Dahalo words additional tonic possibilities, as Dahalo pitch accent is syllable-dependent (see below), and Maddieson et al. report that this does not seem to be the case. Tosco (1991) analyzes these as consonant clusters, and additionally reports fricative and glottalized clusters:, , and.

Allophony
The laminal coronals are denti-alveolar, whereas the apicals are alveolar tending toward post-alveolar.

When geminate, the epiglottals are a voiceless stop and fricative. (Thus is not pharyngeal as sometimes reported, since pharyngeal stops are not believed to be possible.) In utterance-initial position they may be a partially voiced (negative voice onset time) stop and fricative. However, as singletons between vowels, is a flap or even an approximant with weak voicing, whereas  is a fully voiced approximant. Other obstruents are similarly affected intervocalically, though not to the same degree.

are often fricated to between vowels. (The retraction diacritic in $\langle\rangle$ serves merely to emphasize that it is further back than . Initially, they and are often voiceless, whereas  are fortis (perhaps aspirated).  has little rounding.

There is a lot of variability in the voicing of clicks, so this distinction may be being lost. The nasal clicks are nasalized prior to the click release and are voiced throughout; the voiceless clicks usually have about 30ms of voice onset time, but sometimes less. There is no voiceless nasal airflow, but following vowels may have a slightly nasalized onset. Thus these clicks are similar to glottalized nasal clicks in other languages. Voiceless clicks are much more common than voiced clicks.

Vowels
Dahalo has a symmetric 5-vowel system of pairs of short and long vowels, totaling 10 vowels:

Phonotactics
Dahalo words are commonly 2–4 syllables long. Syllables are exclusively of the CV pattern, except that consonants may be geminate between vowels. As with many other Afro-Asiatic languages, gemination is grammatically productive. Voiced consonants partially devoice, and prenasalized stops denasalize when geminated as part of a grammatical function. However, lexical prenasalised geminate stops also occur.

The consonants and  are systematically excluded from the word-initial position.

(It is likely that the glottals and clicks do not occur as geminates, although only a few words with intervocalic clicks are known, such as .)

Dahalo has pitch accent, normally with zero to one high-pitched syllables (rarely more) per root word. If there is a high pitch, it is most frequently on the first syllable; in the case of disyllabic words, this is the only possibility: e.g. head,  pierce.

Status of clicks
Dahalo is one of very few outside southern Africa to have phonemic clicks (the others being Sandawe and Hadza in East Africa and Damin, a mutually unintelligible register of Lardil, spoken mainly on Mornington Island in Australia). The clicks in this language are not Cushitic, and may be a remnant of a shift from a non-Cushitic language. Ten Raa shows some slight evidence that speakers of Dahalo once spoke a language similar to Sandawe, which does have clicks. This provides some explanation for why clicks are only present in about 40 lexical items, some of which are basic (e.g. "breast," "saliva," and "forest").