Vowels Consonants Swazi does not distinguish between places of articulation in its clicks. They are
dental (as ) or might also be
alveolar (as ). It does, however, distinguish five or six manners of articulation and phonation, including tenuis, aspirated, voiced, breathy voiced, nasal, and breathy-voiced nasal. The consonants each have two allophones. and can occur as ejective sounds, and , or as their other common allophones, and . The sound at the beginning of stems is , and is usually within words.
Tone Swazi exhibits three surface tones: high, mid and low. Tone is unwritten in the standard orthography. Traditionally, only the high and mid tones are taken to exist phonemically, with the low tone conditioned by a preceding
depressor consonant. Bradshaw (2003) however argues that all three tones exist underlyingly. Phonological processes acting on tone include: • When a stem with non-high tone receives a prefix with underlying high tone, this high tone moves to the
antepenult (or to the penult, when the onset of the antepenult is a depressor). • High spread: all syllables between two high tones become high, as long as no depressor intervenes. This happens not only word-internally, but also across a word boundary between a verb and its object. The depressor consonants are all voiced obstruents other than . The allophone of appears to behave as a depressor for some rules but not others. ==Orthography==