Tsez phonology

Each phoneme is listed with its IPA [brackets], Latin, and Cyrillic transcriptions.

Consonants

 * Tsez shows an inventory of 33 consonants.
 * The glottal stop is not phonemic but occurs automatically before non-pharyngealized vowels in word-initial position.
 * Consonant clusters are often broken up by inserting the epenthetic vowel . After, the inserted vowel is.
 * Word-initial consonants can be pharyngealized and are marked as such in the proposed orthography by a small following the consonant; in the Cyrillic spelling a palochka ("") is used after the vowel that follows the consonant.
 * A syllable-final pharyngealization of the consonant is transcribed in Cyrillic with Cʼ (where C stands for a consonant) and with VCˤ in the Latin transcription (the V stands for a vowel). Some dictionaries write this as VӀC though, which makes the sequence CVӀC ambiguous (see below).
 * A syllable-initial pharyngealization of the consonant is transcribed in Cyrillic with CVӀ (the palochka follows the vowel, since the pharyngealization actually affects it more than the preceding consonant) and with CˤV in the Latin transcription.
 * The pharyngealization itself is reported to be epiglottal.
 * Labialized consonants are written as Cв in the Cyrillic and as Cʷ in the Latin transcription, respectively. Any consonant besides and the bilabials can be labialized.

Vowels

 * The Tsebari dialect has only one long vowel ā.
 * A vowel is dropped before another vowel, so there are never two consecutive vowels. However, a final -u labializes the preceding consonant, if followed by a vowel.
 * Word-initial e is spelled э in Cyrillic.
 * In the proposed Cyrillic orthography, ya, yo, yu can also be written as я, ё, ю.
 * In the Asakh dialect, lengthened vowels are automatically neutralized to ā. Other dialects (e.g. Mokok) also have a low front vowel, usually transcribed as ä in Latin and аь in Cyrillic, some also have a long mid back rounded vowel , transcribed as ō.

Phonotactics
The syllable structure is generally CV(C). There are no vowel clusters. It is an agglutinative language with a complex morphology. Suffixes are either C, V, CV, VC or C+CV (where the first consonant belongs to the preceding syllable), depending on the structure of the stem. An example is the superessive suffix -ƛʼ(o), which attached to the word besuro (fish) forms besuro-ƛʼ (on the fish) and together with is (bull) forms is-ƛʼo in order to maintain the syllable restriction.