Kaingang phonology

Consonants
A large number of allophones map to a set of 14 phonemes:

All consonants have varying allophones depending on their position in the word and on the adjancency of nasal vowels:
 * The oral stops have prenasalized allophones when following a nasal vowel. In unstressed syllables,  is furthermore voiced to become.
 * The glottal stop and the non-stop consonants are realized as nasalized  preceding nasal vowels.
 * The phonemes are only realized as voiced oral stops between two oral vowels. They are realized as voiced prenasalized stops  when between a nasal and an oral vowel, as well as word-initially before oral vowels. Between an oral and a nasal vowel they are conversely realized as prestopped . Between two nasal vowels, or word-initially before nasal vowels, they are realized as full nasal stops: . The first two types of realization also apply when occurring in the syllable coda and followed by a non-nasal segment; these voiced/prenasalized will however be additionally unreleased: . However, by convention these stop-phonemes are always written as  in the orthography.
 * When preceded by an oral vowel, the sequences can be realized as geminate stops:.
 * is optionally labialized:, etc.
 * The non-glottal fricatives can word-initially be optionally realized as affricates (including their nasal allophones: .)
 * can optionally be realized as a voiced bilabial fricative, and as a voiced palatal stop .  When nasalized,  varies between  and.
 * Word-initially, is preceded by an epenthetic ; it is  in tonic syllables and  in atonic syllables, and when nasalized, it varies between  and . As a syllable coda it is a flap when oral and approximant when nasal, and may optionally be palatalized:.
 * Word-initially in a stressed syllable, may vary in realization between dental  and alveolar . Following palatal consonants or preceding a close vowel, it can also realized as a palatal stop,.

Vowels
The vowels of the central column may be central or back:. and are both realized as  in atonic syllables, while  and  are both.