Nepali phonology

Nepali is the national language of Nepal. Besides being spoken as a mother tongue by more than 48% of the population of Nepal, it is also spoken in Bhutan and India. The language is recognized in the Nepali constitution as an official language of Nepal.

The variety presented here is standard Nepali as spoken in Nepal. There are three major dialects: eastern, central, and western. Though many dialects can be distinguished in Nepal and other South Asian countries, there is reported to be little variation in phonology from one to another.

Vowels
Nepali has 11 phonologically distinctive vowels, including 6 oral vowels and 5 nasal vowels (indicated in the IPA with tildes ~). Although Sanskrit—the ancestral language of Nepali—had a phonological distinction in vowel length (for example, versus  and  versus ), there is no such distinction in spoken Nepali. However, due to a process of h-deletion, there are words in which some speakers produce long vowels, such as ('mountain'), analyzed phonemically as.

As the above list shows, there are five nasal vowels. The high mid back vowel does not have a nasal counterpart at the phonological level; although the vowel  does exist phonetically in the language, it is  often in free variation with its oral counterpart, as in  ~  'short',  ~  'sheep'. Nasal vowels are not frequent in the Nepali lexicon, compared to a language such as French in which the number of nasal vowels is large. They occur mostly in verbs.

According to, the evidence for the distinctiveness of vowel nasalization is not nearly as strong as that for the distinctiveness of the six oral vowels. They state that minimal pairs are easily obtainable only for the vowel. Examples are shown below:


 * 'inside corner', 'tremble!' (2nd p. sg. imperative)
 * ('shelter'), ('bamboo')
 * ('rent'),  ('pots')
 * ('be heated!'), ('row')
 * ('pressure'), ('magnolia wood')

Other minimal pairs include ('name') vs. ('barber') and ('village') vs. ('sing' 2nd p. sg. imperative). At the phonetic level, oral vowels can be nasalized when following a nasal consonant.

Diphthongs
recognizes ten diphthongs:

Consonants
Spoken Nepali has 27 consonants in its native system:

The glides and  are nonsyllabic variants of  and, respectively. All consonants but these two,, and may also occur as geminates between vowels. Apart from forming lexically distinctive words, as in चपल  ('unstable') and  चप्पल  ('slipper'), gemination also forms the intensive degree of adjectives, as in  ('very delicious'), compare  ('delicious').

The murmured stops may lose their breathy-voice between vowels and word-finally. Non-geminate aspirated and murmured stops may also become fricatives (e.g. 'clean' → ;  'before' → ).

have a postalveolar flap allophone in postvocalic position. is always a trill.

Loanword consonants
Loanwords from Sanskrit introduce further consonants that are not active in the phonological inventory of the spoken language for some educated speakers, occurring in borrowed words where they are prescriptively pronounced as described in Sanskrit grammars. The retroflex nasal occurs in the speech of some speakers, in words such as  बाण ('arrow'). A posterior sibilant occurs in such words as  नरेश ('king'). The language does not have any minimal pairs opposing and, and speakers sometimes use these sounds interchangeably.