User:Francis Tyers/эвскара

Consonants

Table of consonant phonemes of Standard Basque

		Labial	Lamino- dental	Apico- alveolar	Palatal or postalveolar	Velar	Glottal
Nasal		м m		н n	нь, -in- ɲ
Plosive	voiceless	п p	т t		tt, -it- c	к k
	voiced	б b	д d		dd, -id- ɟ	г ɡ
Affricate	voiceless		tz ts̻	ts ts̺	ч tʃ
Fricative	voiceless	ф f	z s̻	s s̺	ш ʃ		h /∅/, h
	(mostly)1 voiced				j ʝ~x
Lateral				л l	ll, -il- ʎ
Rhotic	Trill			р-, -rr-, -р r
	Tap			-р- ɾ

Basque has a distinction between laminal and apical articulation for the alveolar fricatives and affricates. With the laminal alveolar fricative Template:IPA-eu, the friction occurs across the blade of the tongue, the tongue tip pointing toward the lower teeth. This is the usual /s/ in most European languages. It is written with an orthographic Template:Angbr. By contrast, the voiceless apicoalveolar fricative Template:IPA-eu is written Template:Angbr; the tip of the tongue points toward the upper teeth and friction occurs at the tip (apex). For example, zu "you" is distinguished from su "fire". The affricate counterparts are written Template:Angbr and Template:Angbr. So, etzi "the day after tomorrow" is distinguished from etsi "to give up"; atzo "yesterday" is distinguished from atso "old woman".

In the westernmost parts of the Basque country, only the apical Template:Angbr and the alveolar affricate Template:Angbr are used.

Basque also features postalveolar sibilants (/ʃ/, written Template:Angbr, and /tʃ/, written Template:Angbr), sounding like English sh and ch.

There are two palatal stops, voiced and unvoiced, as well as a palatal nasal and a palatal lateral (the palatal stops are not present in all dialects). These and the postalveolar sounds are typical of diminutives, which are used frequently in child language and motherese (mainly to show affection rather than size). For example, tanta "drop" vs. ttantta /canca/ "droplet". A few common words, such as txakur /tʃakur/ "dog", use palatal sounds even though in current usage they have lost the diminutive sense; the corresponding non-palatal forms now acquiring an augmentative or pejorative sense: zakur—big dog. Many Basque dialects exhibit a derived palatalisation effect, in which coronal onset consonants change into the palatal counterpart after the high front vowel /i/. For example, the /n/ in egin "to act" becomes palatal in southern and western dialects when a suffix beginning with a vowel is added: /eɡina/ = [eɡiɲa] "the action", /eɡines/ = [eɡiɲes] doing.

File:Diaphonej.svg

Regional realisations of Template:Angbr

The letter Template:Angbr has a variety of realisations according to the regional dialect: [j, dʒ, x, ʃ, ɟ, ʝ], as pronounced from west to east in south Bizkaia and coastal Lapurdi, central Bizkaia, east Bizkaia and Gipuzkoa, south Navarre, inland Lapurdi and Low Navarre, and Zuberoa, respectively.

The letter Template:Angbr is silent in the Spanish Basque provinces, but pronounced in the French ones. Unified Basque spells it except when it is predictable, in a position following a consonant.

Unless they are recent loanwords (e.g. Ruanda (Rwanda), radar...), words cannot begin with the letter Template:Angbr, and when they were borrowed earlier, the initial r- is changed to err-, more rarely to irr- (irratia [the radio], irrisa [the rice]). This is similar to how in Spanish, faced with words beginning with s+ consonant (such as "state") get an initial e (estado).