Below, is a chart of all the phonemic consonants available in Shangkurian.

For the most part, the sounds which are are written in IPA with a standard latin script letter sound as they do in English. The /p/, /b/, /d/, /k/, /g/, /m/, /n/, /s/, and /l/ sounds are largely the same as they appear in English spelling. The rest of the sounds however, may need some additional explanation.

• /t̪/
  - A "t" pronounced with the tip of the tongue against the back of the teeth. As in certain varieties of Latin American Spanish "bonita".
• /ʃ/
  - This is the "sh" sound in English.
• /tʃ/
  - Similar to the "ch" sound in English, save for the puff of air, or aspiration, found in American English dialects.
• /ŋ/
  - Usually this sound is restricted to the ends of syllables in English, spelled with "ng". Try taking the "ng" from the words "sing", "thing", and "fling" and pronouncing it by itself.
• /m̥, n̥/
  , and
  /ŋ̊/
  - These voiceless nasal sounds are articulated just like their voiced counterparts, however before the sound is released a short puff of air is let out of the nose. Here the romanization will help, because it is rather difficult to pronounce an "h" before these sounds without correctly making this puff of air.
• /ʘ/
  - This sounds a bit like blowing a kiss, but instead of pursing the lips, you would keep the lips relaxed as if you were simply saying a "p" sound.
• /ǀ/
  - This sound is frequently used when someone says "tsk tsk" in a scolding manner.
• /ǂ¡/
  - There are two parts of this sound. The tongue starts at the top of the mouth building up pressure, then it releases with a "clopping" sound and hits the bottom of the mouth. I've heard this sound colloquially referred to as a "tongue click", though that is rather imprecise in this situation.
• /ǁ/
  - People use this sound when they are trying to call horses and other animals. You use your tongue to draw air sharply inward at the sides of your mouth.
• /ǃ/
  - This sound may take a bit of practice to regularly produce it. Take your tongue and curl it backward so that the back of your tongue is pushing against the top of your mouth. Sealing the rest of the oral airway, pull your tongue back and down to quickly release the seal.
• /x/
  - This sound is found in English when people try to pronounce the word "loch" with a Scottish pronunciation. It is also ubiquitously found in German, most notably in the "ch" at the end of the name "Bach".

There are also prevocalized versions of voiced stops and nasals, and pre-nasalized versions of clicks.

• /^ɤm/, /^ən/,
  and
  /^ɯŋ/
  - The sound of the "m/hm" is started with the mouth open, causing a very short vowel sound to appear before the consonant. The relationship is more like the "id" in the word "idiot", than the "iP" in "iPod". Similar methods of articulation are used for the other two prevocalized nasals.
• /^ɤb/, /^əd/,
  and
  /^ɯg/
  - These sounds are produced in the same way as the prevocalized nasals. Instead of starting the sound with the airstream already closed, as is the usual way of articulating a stop, a short vowel-like sound is allowed to escape before the consonant. While the value of the vocalization is different for the places of articulation in careful speech, it is often reduced to a schwa in running speech.
• /^mʘ/, /ⁿǀ,ⁿǂ¡/, /ⁿǁ/
  , and
  /^ŋǃ/
  - In a similar manner to the prevocalized sounds, the prenasalized clicks start with the tongue in place to produce the click, and a short vocalization from the vocal cords makes a short nasal consonant before the click is released.

Glides

Words are not just made of letter sounds, however, they also include tone. Tone is the inflection of the voice which conveys meaning. While some people say tone is like singing, it is really more like asking a question in English. If someone were to say in American English "Is that for me?", the pitch of their voice goes up, but no one would say that they are singing. It is just a change of where their voice is sitting in the normal spoken range.

Shangkurian has 6 tones which are applied to words. They are visualized below:

• Tone 1 (Trōp /˦/) - High tone with nasal voice
• Tone 2 (Gao /˨/) - Mid-low tone
• Tone 3 (Sùng /˥˧/) - Mid-high falling tone
• Tone 4 (Tyõc /˧˥/) - Mid rising tone
• Tone 5 (Xuạ /˨˩ˀ/) - Low falling glottalized tone with creaky voice
• Tone 6 (Hĕ /˧˩˨/) - Mid-dipping tone

Reciting Tone

In both the case of the prevocalized/prenasalized syllable onsets and with reduplication, the question of how to handle the tone arises. For these sections of words, which haven't been assigned a tone lexically, one would use a reciting tone to fill in the tonal gaps of a word or construction. The concept of a reciting tone essentially copies the first or last part of the word's tonal contour. If a sesquisyllabic word has a fourth tone (tyõc) assigned to it, pre-vocalization of the onset consonant would adopt a mid-level tone to match with the beginning of the tonal contour. Likewise, when a reduplicated construction is used, the level where the tone contour ends would then be adopted for a reduplication construction (which doesn't already have a tone association).

Now that all of the individual phonemes have been established, the rules in which they are put together into words needs to be set. This is called phonotactics. Taking the various categories of phonemes (i.e. consonant, vowel, glide, and tone) we can start to make words. Below, each of these categories will be assigned a single letter as shorthand. If that category is optional to make a real word, then it will be placed in parentheses. Sometimes there will be a choice of 2 categories, so a slash is placed between the choices.

Category Abbreviations

• C - Consonant
• V - Vowel
• G - Glide
• T - Tone
• N - Coda Nasal
• K - Coda Stop

So with this shorthand, it is now possible to say that a legal Shangkurian word is defined as a single syllable of:

(C)VT(N/K)/(C)GT

There are a couple more rules to think about too. Firstly, the phoneme /p/ cannot be in the initial consonant place of a word. Instead the only place where /p/ can be pronounced is at the end of a word. Additionally, there is a fixed set of rimes which can serve as vowel/coda pairs.

Rimes

Onset Aspiration

A rule in which /t/ becomes aspirated before a monophthong vowel and a voiceless stop coda.

[voiceless alveolar stop] → [+aspirated] / _VK#

Back Vowel Fronting

A rule in which the monophthongs /u/ and /ɐ/ move toward the front and unround (/ʊ/ and /æ/) when there is no consonant coda.

[back monophthong] → [+front, -round] / _#

High Front Vowel Changes

A rule in which tense front high monophthongs are made lax before lateral consonants (L).

[+front, +tense] → [+front, -tense] / L_

Since the phoneme /p/ cannot occur as an word onset, the grapheme ⟨p⟩ is then used for the bilabial click in onset position, and then used again to represent the voiceless bilabial stop in the coda position. Due to the onset aspiration phonological process, an ⟨h⟩ is included in the romanization after the initial consonant to represent this change (ex. ⟨thic⟩ instead of *⟨tic⟩).

The orthography of Shangkurian is based on the Unified Canadian Syllabics writing system, though several changes have been made to fit the phonology. This system is comprised of several letters, which may be rotated in one of four orientations. The letter itself denotes the initial consonant of the word, and the letter's orientation encodes the vowel nucleus. To write a coda consonant for a word, a smaller version of the base letter is written so as not to confuse it with a full syllable.

Vowel Orientations

There are two main types of consonant letter, arrow-shaped letters and corner-shaped letters, both of these types have their own orientation patterns to denote their vowels. The arrow-shaped letters form a point in the center of one side, which can be moved to the desired orientation (i.e. west = "a", south = "e", north = "i", and east = "o"). The corner-shaped letters often have a sharp angle or foundational corner that points toward the vowel orientations (i.e. southwest = "a", northwest = "e", northeast = "i", southeast="o").

Digraphs

Other phonemes that aren't represented above are constructed with digraphs. The click consonants are made by placing the "ᓬ" symbol before the letter of the corresponding voiceless stop, or voiced in the case of the bilabial click. When the click is prenasalized, the same base stop letter is used with the " ᐦ " symbol placed after it, before any other vowels or tone diacritics.

Similar rules to the prenasalized click are used with ejectives and voiceless nasals. To write an ejective sound, the "ᓫ" symbol is written immediately after the base stop letter. Voiceless nasal consonants are written instead with the corresponding plain nasal letter and the "ᐤ" symbol, again, immediately following.

Other Vowels and Glides

There are more phonemic vowels and glides which aren't represented by the 4 directions of the base writing system, so the bare vowel letters are used after the initial consonant letter. To make the /i/ sound a second "ᐃ" is placed after the initial /ɪ/ syllable, which could either be a consonant letter like "ᐱᐃ", or if the vowel is the beginning of the word it would be written "ᐃᐃ". The vowel /u/ is formed instead by a special symbol. The initial consonant or vowel letter would be in the "ᐅ" position, followed by a "ᐞ" to indicate that /u/ is the vowel.

The remaining glides are constructed as below. For demonstration, /b/ is being used as the initial consonant, but the same paradigm would apply for any other letter that can occur in initial position.

Tone Diacritics and Punctuation

Tone is written via inline diacritics, or tone letters, within the word.

The tone diacritics are written after the vowel of a word. That could be right after the consonant letter is written, or after any additional vowel letter.

As the rules above create a self-segregating system, where the words can be told apart by their structure, spaces between words are not needed. Instead, spaces are used for periods at the end of sentences.