Afansevan/Phonology

Consonants
* /w/ only occurs in foreign loanwords. ** The dental fricatives are allophones of the dental laminal alveolar sibilants, but both sounds can be pronounced whatever you want them to be when or  occur.

Vowel Allophony

 *  and <ö> tend to be realized as [ʉ].
 * Vowels become nasalized when followed by a coda nasal consonant.
 * Vowels other than  are lowered when followed by a coda , so  becomes [e̞ʁ],  becomes [æʁ],  becomes [ø̞ʁ ~ əʁ], <ör> becomes [ɶʁ ~ əʁ],  becomes [o̞ʁ], and  becomes [ʌ̞ʁ].

Tone
Afansevan has developed a six-tone system following the loss of plosives in coda position (other than when there are two plosives in the coda, where the first one is lost, which makes tone phonemic). Note that the vowel in this example is , and that the tone occurs at the end of the nucleus.

Pseudo-Diphthongs
Imperial Afansevan allows a set of pseudo-diphthongs, which is formed by combining any vowel with an approximant  or . Diphthongs ending with -w are only allowed to occur in loanwords, while the pseudo-diphthong  is not allowed to exist in native words at all, often being used to transcribe long /i/, especially in words from Sanskrit and Nahuatl.

Phonotactics
Afansevan's syllable structure is (C)(C)V(C)(C), where C is any consonant, and V is any vowel, <r>, or <l>. Consonant clusters made of two plosives are not allowed in the coda. All permitted consonant clusters in the onset are any obstruent (other than <r>) followed by <r> or <l>, or a sibilant followed by an obstruent. <R> and <l> can serve as the nucleus of a syllable, in that case they are pronounced as syllabic consonants. Voiced and voiceless obstruents (other than <r>) are not allowed to go together in coda-onset clusters, in that case, the last one assimilates the other ones in voicing (e.g. /pzf/>/psf/). Also, voiced obstruents (other than <r>) are not allowed to end a word, as they become voiceless in that environment, but voiceless obstruents are still represented in the romanization, the orthography, and the IPA in phonemic transcriptions (Devoicing at the end of words doesn't exist in the dialect spoken by the Californian royal family). Obstruents of the same place of articulation and manner of articulation of different voicing placed next to each other is also not allowed.

Stress System
Stress always falls on the first syllable. Unstressed vowels are reduced towards the schwa.