Menominee phonology

Below are the basic phonemes of Menominee represented in IPA. Characters to the left are the standard way in which the sound is written; characters to the right are IPA (if it differs).

Vowels

 * Long or  is labialized if the preceding syllable contains a back vowel or when it is followed by a palatalized consonant.  The same is true for
 * Short  is particularly open when found before h and q.
 * is consistently lengthened before.
 * and are treated like long vowels in the assignment of stress.  They contrast with  and .  For example, uah ('he uses it') is distinct from wa:h ('fish egg').  Final  after  becomes primarily bilabial.  The syllable  can alternate with  for some speakers.

Vowels are slightly nasalized before or after or.

Consonants

 * is postdental
 * The unvoiced sibilant can range between  and
 * and do not appear initially, except sometimes as the on-glide of a vowel, in which case they should probably not be considered phonemic.  Final  after  is sometimes dropped and sometimes replaced with, as in pih, ('paddle').

Consonants, including nasals, are palatalized before front vowels and labialized before back vowels.

Menominee does not make contrasts between voiced and voiceless stops and voicing from a following vowel may set in before the opening is complete.

Syllable structure and stress
Syllable structure in Menominee is typically VC(C) or C(C)VC(C); syllables do not end in vowels. Any consonant can begin or end a syllable except h and q. The only clusters which can occur at the end of a syllable are qc and qs. The only cluster which can begin a syllable is kw.

Primary stress occurs on every long vowel or diphthong that is in the next-to-last syllable of a word. Most compounds and inflected forms are treated as single words in assigning stress. Rhetorical stress comes on the last syllable.

Pitch
In an interrogative sentence which uses a question word, there is a rising and then falling of pitch near the beginning and a drop at the end. In yes-no questions, there is a sharp rise in pitch at the end of the sentence. The modulations of pitch for expressing exclamations, quotations, etc. is generally much more pronounced in Menominee than in English.