Souk

Souk (phearaosa souk) is the native language of the Kai people in Southeast Asia. With a little over one million L1 speakers, it is by far the most widely spoken of the Kai-Souk languages, a branch of the larger Song language family. Souk is head-first and primarily isolating, but employs a pattern of infixes and vowel change. It is syllable-timed and has a simple tone system.

Phonology
The below tables represent the best achievable standard for Souk available in the region. Some rural dialects have preserved additional consonants which have been since lost in the modern, urban standard below:

Vowels
The table below lists the first grouping of vowels; namely, the short monophthongs. Souk no longer contrasts diphthongs with long vowels: all formerly pure long vowels (eg. /eː/) have since gained a pattern of centering (eg. [eˑə̆]); thus are they no longer differentiated from ordinary diphthongs.

Monophthongs

Diphthongs

Consonants
Nearly any consonant can appear in coda, or as one half of a word-initial cluster; some are much more common than others. The voiceless plosives /p, t, c, k/ have aspirated variants [pʰ, tʰ, cʰ, kʰ]; these can be better analysed, however, as clusters, since infixes can appear between the plosive and the aspiration, eg. kho ("island") > koh ("island of").


 * 1. Word-final /ɗ/ is a dental approximant [ð]