Czalatian

Consonants
Czalatian uses 27 consonant sounds, many of which are present either in English or in other European languages. It features several palatal consonants (nj, q, gj, qj and lj) - none of which are productively used in English. Uvular, pharyngeal and retroflex consonants are virtually unheard of in the language.

Vowels
Czalatian has ten vowel monopthongs and three dipthongs. The distinction between the sounds /a/ and /ɐ/ is often ambiguous and is becoming less and less distinct. /ɐ/ appears only between consonants, whereas /a/ can appear anywhere.

Alphabet
The Czalatian alphabet

Front C vs Back TZ
The letters c and tz both represent the same sound - namely the voiceless alveolar affricate /ts/, pronounced identically to the ending of the english word cats. Which one to use depends on a few simple rules: c is used before the vowels i and e only, whereas tz is used before all other vowels, all consonants and word-finally. The only exception is in the word ac meaning "this", which allows for it to be distinguished from the identically-pronounced atz meaning "next to/adjacent to".

Letter Ë
As a rule of thumb, the umlaut/trema/double-dot diacritic mark is used not to show frontness (as in Germanic, Turkic and Ugric languages), rather to show a very reduced vowel which is similar to the one represented by its plain letter. The letter ë represents the schwa-sound /ə/, which is a phoneme in its own right in Czalatian. Although its most common position is word finally, it is also seen word initially (ëlekriak "electricity"), within words (vën "mountain") and on its own (ë "never").

Letter Ï
The letter ï has a relatively complicated usage. When I first started constructing Czalatian, it represented the sound /ɨ/ (like the reduced 'e' sound of roses), however after this sound was scrapped, the character was recycled for other uses. In the seldom used Czalatian cyrillic alphabet, the letter ï is represented by the 'Hard Sign' ъ, and the name of the letter is i stų ("short i").
 * It's most common usage is to seperate consonant clusters when they would orthographically be identical to digraph letters (cz, dz, gj, lj, nj, qj, sz, tz and zc), for example in the word mezïci "although", the ï seperates the z and the c to show that they are pronounced seperately as a /z/ followed by a /ts/, rather than the sound /ʒ/ that the digraph letter zc produces, resulting in the pronunciation [mɛz.tsi] as opposed to [mɛ.ʒi]. In this case it has absolutely no phonetic value.
 * Secondly, and rarely, ï replaces the letter i if the use of i would result in a dipthong when a diaeresis would be needed. For example, zeïzų "woman" is pronounced [zɛ.ji.zu] rather than [zeɪ.zu] which the spelling without the ï would suggest.

Letter Ų
The u with ogonek ų represents the vowel /u/ when found at the end of a word. It represents the same sound as u with ring ů, and the reason that they are both retained is that ų represents the loss of the word-final cluster /ug/ into simple /u/, whereas ů continues from the old vowel /u/ which has always been present in the language (which was never seen word-finally). When a suffix is added to a word ending in ų, the /g/ returns. For example when the plural -i is added to zeïzų "woman" it becomes zeïzugi "women".