Tuyuca's consonants are, and its vowels are, with syllable nasalization and pitch accent occurring as well.
Vowels
Consonants
Contrasts
The following words show some of the consonant contrasts.
Bilabial contrasts
Alveolar contrasts
Velar and palatal contrasts
Variation
Voiceless plosives have aspirated variants that tend to occur before high vowels but not near voiceless vowels. There are a few degrees of the amount of aspiration.
Preglottalized variants of occur together at the onset.
* Preglottalized forms of occur in the onset and are in free variation with their plain counterparts.
Prenasal variants of occur after nasal vowels and before oral vowels: .
* The can also surface as before high nasal vowels.
The also has a nasalized variant that occurs before nasal vowels.
Nasal harmony
Segments in a word are either all nasal or all oral. Note that voiceless segments are transparent. See further remarks regarding the oral/nasal nature of affixes in the [|Morphophonemics] section.
Suprasegmental features
Tuyuca's two suprasegmental features are tone and nasalization.
Tone
There is a high tone and a low tone in Tuyuca. The phonological word has only one high tone, which may occur in any syllable of the word. The low tone has two variants: a mid-tone, which occurs in words with at least three syllables in free variation, and the low tone, which occurs in internal syllables that have that is contiguous to the high tone but not preceded by a low tone.
The accent is the same as high tone.
The tone is contrastive in VV syllables.
VCV words, except for loanwords, have the tone on the second syllable.
Nasalization
Nasalization is phonemic and operates at the root level.
A syllable is any unit that may take tone and has a vocalic nucleus, regardless of whether or not it has a consonant before it.
Restrictions
and do not occur word-initially
and do not occur.
No VV string starts with.
Multisyllabic VVV strings occur, but not all combinations of vowels are attested. is always last in such strings.
V may be optionally be pronounced with aspiration, with the same quality as the preceding vowel, when the syllable is both unstressed and before syllables with voiceless onsets.
Morphophonemics
All affixes are in one of the two classes:
Oral affixes that may undergo nasalization, like the plural morpheme -ri: 'marks'
Affixes that are intrinsically oral or nasal and are not changed.
When a nasal CV suffix occurs and C is a continuant or a vibrant /r/, regressive nasalization is undergone by the preceding vowel.
