There are five vowel qualities in Dene Sųłine, and the vowels may contrast in tone (H or L) nasality (oral or nasal) and length (long or short). These contrasts are generally found only in the stems and minimal pairs are not always available. Vowel length especially is hard to determine. We have provided examples of the vowels that we have found in our data. We have plotted in the charts below the vowels space and the individual vowel tokens. These charts represent all the vowel tokens, both the stems and the prefixes. In these tokens, there is considerable overlap between the front and back mid and high vowels. This is likely at least a partial effect of putting both the stem and prefix vowels in one chart. In future editions we will present the stems vowels separately from the prefix vowels, as we find that the stem vowels are longer and somewhat more carefully articulated.
The L tones are unmarked, H tones are marked with a áccent.
SP1 Vowel space:
Vowel token chart:
