When the final syllable is light (CV), stress tends to be penultimate. When the final syllable is heavy (CVC, CVV, CVː), stress tends to be final.
Vowels There are a total of eight vowel quantities in Avava: five short vowels and three long vowels. The five short Avava vowel qualities, . is pronounced between a bilabial trill and an alveolar and, in final syllables, between a bilabial trill and . About 2% of vowels are long. Long is not attested, and long is marginal. This is a pattern shared with
Naman. At the end of a
prosodic unit – in citation form, utterance-finally and when speaking slowly – word-final vowels other than tend to be replaced with "diphthongs" . Word-initial vowels present in citation form tend to be lost when the word is linked to others, e.g. when the subject of a verb or possessed by a pronoun. This is the reason for the alternative form of the name of the language,
vava. : A notable variant of the same phoneme shown with short vowels is when /u/ undergoes centralisation to [ʉ] in two different settings: in closed syllables between a
bilabial trill and a following
alveolar consonant, and . The three long vowels in Avava are /i:/, /u:/, and /a:/. Though there is evidence for the long /o:/, the vowel is only shown in three words throughout the entire lexicon of Avava.
Consonants : is
post-alveolar. The voiceless stops are lightly aspirated. Otherwise, the consonants have the values their IPA transcriptions suggest. does not occur at the beginning of a word. Labialized consonants are only found before . There are some grammatical contexts and perhaps random situations when word-initial and are replaced by and . is known from only a single word. Word-final is lost when the word is suffixed or followed by a modifier. The prenasalized trills may be described as , with the quite audible stop analyzed as
excrescent, or as , with the representation common in the area of prenasalized voiced stops as simply voiced stops. is quite common in the language. It is generally rounded, , and word-finally the trilled release is at least partially devoiced, . It may occur in word-final position after any vowel, but in CV position the following vowel is overwhelmingly , though other vowels do occur, e.g. 'coral'. It is generated grammatically when the 3sg-irrealis is prefixed to a verb root beginning with , as in > 's/he will come'.
Consonant allophones Prenasalization is maintained after oral consonants, e.g. 'earthquake', but is lost after a nasal, e.g. 'bamboo roof pins'. Prenasalized stops are occasionally devoiced word finally, e.g. 'mud'. occasionally has a trilled release when followed by : 'spit'. Nasals and liquids are syllabified in word-final CN, CL clusters and in medial CNC, CLC clusters: 'we (paucal inclusive)', 'we (paucal exclusive)'. is word-initially, word-finally, before another consonant, and between front vowels; it is also the more common allophone between front and non-front vowels. It is between identical non-front vowels, and this is the more common allophone between non-identical non-front vowels. are generally word-initially. ==Nouns and Noun Phrases==