Newwang

Consonants
1. The retroflex consonants /ɳ/, /ʈ/, and /ʂ/ are neutralized with their dentialveolar counterparts when syllable final, in free variation but tending to shift to either one or the other depending on the surrounding consonants.

2. The palatal nasal /ɲ/ may only be found in the coda, and tends to be reduced to nasalization of the preceding vowel in educated speech.

3. The labial fricative [f] only appears in the coda, and the labial plosive [p] only syllable initially, thus classifying them as one archiphoneme /p/ is most useful.

4. Whether or not the glottal stop [ʔ] exists as its own phoneme is very unclear. It tends to appear in between adjacent vowels, suggesting it only appears syllable-initially. Yet to some speakers (particularly those in the Northwest of the country) it appears at the end of clauses (perhaps explaining the Northwests distinct dialectal lack of Newwang’s affirmative particle), suggesting it acts a suprasegmental feature.

5.The dorsal approximants /j/ and /w/ are rounded when adjacent to close vowels.

Vowels
1. The merger of /u/ and /ɯ/ as [ʊ] is a particular indicator of southern to central-southwestern “rural” speech.

2. A rhoticized pronunciation of /ɜ/ is an indicator of a very urban accent.

Phonotactics
Initials:

Finals: