Limburgish sound inventory

The sound inventory below is based on the variety of West-Limburgs spoken in Montfort.

Consonants
may not show up in the Hasselt dialect, but is common in other Limburgish dialects, e.g. zègke (Dutch: zeggen) "to say".

Other Limburgish dialects also have the following sounds: (landj);  (tenj, teeth).

is realized as in Belgian Limburgish.

is a common allophone of, especially in coda position. It is rare in the Montfortian dialect.

and are allophones of  and, occurring in a front-vowel environment.

is an allophone of. In some dialects, it may be the usual realization of.

In most dialects, is nowadays uvular.

Overall, Limburgish dialects tend to have more consonants than Dutch. They also tend to have more vowels. According to Peter Ladefoged, the vowel inventory of the dialect of Weert is perhaps the richest in the world. It has 28 vowels (12 long vowels, 10 short vowels and 6 diphthongs).

In most of the Limburgish dialects spoken to the southeast of Panningen—for example those of Roermond, Sittard and Heerlen— appears at the beginning of words in the consonant clusters sp, st, sl, sm, sn and zw. The same sound is realized as elsewhere (e.g. sjtraot/straot, "street"). This is not the case, however, in the dialects of for example Venlo, Weert, Maastricht, Echt, Montfort and Posterholt.

Monophthongs
only occurs in unstressed syllables.

are realised as before alveolar consonants.

Diphthongs
The diphthongs occur, as well as combinations of  +. only occurs in French loanwords and interjections.

is realized as before alveolar consonants. can be realized as or. In the dialect of Geleen, /ee/ is realized as /iè/ and /oo/ as /oa/. In many dialects such as that of Maastricht and Sittard, the long vowel in Dutch cognates is most of the time realized as, as in nao ("after", "to, towards"). The Standard Dutch equivalents are na and naar.

The unrounded vowels ie, i, é/è, iê, eé, ê/èè and ei are very common in about 50 Belgian Limburgish dialects where they replace their rounded counterparts which occur almost only in French loanwords such as dzjuus.