The phonology of Wichita is unusual, with no pure
labial consonants (though there are two
labiovelars /kʷ/ and /w/). There is only one nasal (depending on conflicting theory one or more nasal sounds may appear, but all theories seem to agree that they are allophones of the same phoneme, at best), and possibly a three vowel system using only height for contrast.
Consonants Wichita has 10
consonants. In the
Americanist orthography generally used when describing Wichita, is spelled , and is . Though neither Rood nor Garvin include nasals in their respective consonant charts for Wichita, Rood's later inclusion of nasals in phonetic transcription for his 2008 paper ("Some Wichita Recollections: Aspects of Culture Reflected in Language") support the appearance of at least . •
Labials are generally absent, occurring in only two roots:
kammac to grind corn and
camma:ci to hoe, to cultivate (⟨c⟩ = ). • Apart from the in these two verbs,
nasals are allophonic. The allophones and are in
complementary distribution: It is before alveolars ( and in geminate ) and initially before a vowel, and elsewhere. Thus its initial consonant clusters are and , and its medial and final clusters are . • Final
r and
w are voiceless: • Glottalized final consonants: One aspect of Wichita phonetics is the occurrence of glottalized final consonants. Taylor asserts that when a long vowel precedes a glottal stop, there is no change to the pronunciation. However, when the glottal stop is preceded by a short vowel, the vowel is eliminated. If the short vowel was preceded by a consonant, then the consonant is glottalized. Taylor hypothesizes that these glottalized final consonants show that the consonant was not originally a final consonant, that the proto form (an earlier language from which Wichita split off, that Taylor was aiming to reconstruct in his paper) ended in a glottal stop, and that a vowel has been lost between the consonant and glottal stop. : - long vowel : V - short vowel : C - consonant : # - preceding sound ends word • Taylor also finds that previous phonetic transcriptions have recorded the phoneme (written ), as occurring after , while is recorded when preceded by . • The merger; or Why Wichita Has No : • In Wichita the sounds and are not differentiated when they begin a word, and word-initial *p has become . This is unusual, in that the majority of Caddoan languages pronounce words that used to begin with *w with . In Wichita, the three sounds were also merged when preceded by a consonant. Wichita shifted consonant initial *p to with other medial occurrences of *p. and remain distinct following a vowel. For example, the word for 'man' is in Wichita, but in South Band Pawnee and in Skiri Pawnee.
Phonological rules • The coalescence of morpheme-final and subsequent morpheme-initial or to : • changes to whenever it follows a consonantal segment which is not or : • changes to before or . The most numerous examples involve the collective-plural prefix
r- before a morpheme beginning with : • with a following or to give : • changes to before or any non-vowel: • changes to before : • , , and change to after or :
Vowels Wichita has either three or four vowels, depending on analysis: These are transcribed as . Word-final vowels are
devoiced. Though Rood employs the letter in his transcriptions, Garvin instead uses , and asserts that is a separate phoneme. However, considering the imprecision in vowel sound articulation, what is likely important about these transcriptions is that they attest to a back vowel that is not low. Taylor uses Garvin's transcription in his analysis, but theorizes a shift of *u to medially in Wichita, but does not have enough examples to fully analyze all the possible environments. He also discusses a potential shift from *a to , but again, does not have enough examples to develop a definitive hypothesis. Taylor finds only occurs with intervocalic glottal stops. Rood argues that is not phonemic, as it is often equivalent to any vowel + + any vowel. For example, is frequently contracted to (the high tone is an effect of the elided consonant). There are
relatively few cases where speakers will not accept a substitution of vowel + + vowel for ; one of them is 'eagle'. Rood also proposes that, with three vowels that are arguably high, mid, and low, the front-back distinction is not phonemic, and that one may therefore speak of a '
vertical' vowel inventory (see below). This also has been claimed for relatively few languages, such as the
Northwest Caucasian languages and the
Ndu languages of
Papua New Guinea. There is clearly at least a two-way contrast in
vowel length. Rood proposes that there is a three-way contrast, which is quite rare among the world's languages, although well attested for
Mixe, and probably present in
Estonian. However, in Wichita, for each of the three to four vowels qualities, one of the three lengths is rare, and in addition the extra-long vowels frequently involve either an extra
morpheme, or suggest that
prosody may be at work. For example, :: 'the strong one' :: 'the strong one
s' :: 'let him find you' :: 'let him find
it for you' :: 'there' :: 'here it is' (said when handing something over) :: 'that one' (Note that it is common in many languages to use prosodic lengthening with demonstratives such as 'there' or 'that'.) This contrasts with Mixe, where it is easy to find a three-way length contrast without the addition of morphemes. Under Rood's analysis, then, Wichita has 9 phonemic vowels:
Tone There is also a contrastive high
tone, indicated here by an acute accent.
Syllable and phonotactics While vowel sequences are uncommon (unless the extra-long vowels are considered sequences),
consonant clusters are ubiquitous in Wichita. Words may begin with clusters such as () and (). The longest cluster noted in Wichita is five consonants, counting as a single consonant: 'while sleeping'; however, Wichita
syllables are more commonly CV or CVC. ==Grammar and morphology==