Piais/Phonology

Monophthongs
The Piaisian vowel system contains 5 phonemes which can be short or long: /a/, /e/, /i/, /o/ and /u/. The phoneme /a/ is the only phoneme with only one possible pronunciation for both the short and long form - all other vowel phonemes have allophones for their short forms: [ɛ] is an allophone for [e], [ɪ] for [i], [ɔ] for [o] and [ʊ] for [u].

The vowel [ə] sometimes appears in the language but it is not considered a phoneme, nor is it used by anybody. Words ending in voiced consonants are sometimes pronounced with a final schwa to make their pronunciation easier.

Diphthongs
Piais distinguishes 2 different kinds of diphthongs - so called "true" diphthongs and "false" diphthongs.

The true diphthongs are those which only contain vowels. The following diphthongs are in this category: /aɪ̯/, /aʊ̯/, /eɪ̯/ and /oʊ̯/.

The false diphthongs are those which contain a semivowel. False diphthongs are the (much) larger group of diphthongs: The semivowel /j/ can form diphthongs with all vowels except /i/, the semivowel /w/ can form diphthongs with all vowels except /u/. The length of the vowel does not matter for false diphthongs.

Triphthongs
In a similar fashion to false diphthongs, all triphthongs are combinations of the 2 semivowels /j/ or /w/ and one of the true diphthongs.