There are five vowel qualities in North Slavey, 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 both the stem and prefix vowel tokens plotted together. In the individual tokens, there is considerable overlap between the vowels, the mid front vowel has an especially broad distribution in the vowel space. This may be an effect of plotting the stem and prefix vowels together. In future editions we will present the stems vowels separately from the prefix vowels, as we find that the stem vowels tend to be longer and somewhat more carefully articulated.
The L tones are unmarked, H tones are marked with a áccent.
SP5 Vowel Space:
A plot of the individual vowel tokens:
