Phonology

Consonants

In the table below, we can see the consonant inventory of Naasai. There are fifteen phonemic consonants in the language.

	Labial	Dental	Palatal	Velar
Nasal	m	n		ŋ
Plosive	p	t		k
Affricate		ts	tʃ
Fricative		s	ʃ	x
Approximant		l	j	w
Trill		r

When found before consonants having a different place of articulation, the nasal consonants /m n ŋ/ undergo anticipatory assimilation and match the following consonant's place of articulation: [m] before labial consonants, [n] before dental consonants, [ɲ] before palatal consonants, and [ŋ] before velar consonants.

Vowels

In the table below, we can see the ten phonemic monophthong vowels in the language. Monophthong vowels are found in pairs of long and short vowels, with long vowels being pronounced for twice the length of time as short vowels.

	Front	Back
Close	i i:	u u:
Close-Mid	e e:	o o:
Open		a a:

In addition to the monophthong vowels, there are two phonemic diphthongs: /ai/ and /au/. Similar to long vowels, diphthongs are pronounced for twice the length of time as short vowels.

Prosody

Naasai makes a distinction between "light" and "heavy" syllables when assigning stress to syllables. Light syllables have short vowels as nuclei and lack codas while heavy syllables have long vowels or diphthongs as nuclei or contain a coda.

In general, primary stress is assigned to the penultimate syllable in a word unless the final syllable is a heavy syllable, in which case it receives the primary stress. Secondary stress is assigned to every other syllable from the back to the front of a word from the primary stress. Monosyllabic words do not receive stress.