Mohawk language

Mohawk is a Native American language spoken in the United States. It is part of the Iroquoian family spoken in the Western U.S.

Phonology

Based on sound files available at http://www.ohwejagehka.com/lang.htm, the phoneme inventory appears to be as follows (using SAMPA notation):

Consontants

1. There are no bilabials (unless one counts /w/ as labial rather than velar).
2. It's unclear if aspiration is phonemic or a realization of C + /h/; probably the latter as ‘nh’ is /n/ + /h/, and ‘sh’ is /s/ + /h/ (not SAMPA /S/).
3. From listening to the syllabification of careful speech, I also assume that orthographic 'ts' is indeed an affricate, since 'tsh' corresponds to SAMPA /tS/ - though it begs the question of why not use a single symbol for each of these? (After all, with such a small inventory, there are lots of Latin letters available!)

	Dental	Palatal	Velar	Glottal
Stop	t		k	?
Affricate	ts	tS
Fricative	s			h
Nasal	n
Liquids	l		w

Vowels

1. Length is contrastive.
2. Nasalization is contrastive.
3. There appear to be a high and low tone. (See tonal language.)

	Front	Central	Back
High	i
Mid		E	o
Low			a