Appendix:Chuvash pronunciation

See at Wikipedia for a thorough look at the sounds of Chuvash. The orthography of Chuvash, however, is rather morphophonemic than being phonemic.

Consonants
Between vowels, and after nasals (/m/, /n/), semivowels (/j/), or liquids (/l/, /r/); stops, sibilants, and affricates (all consonants except five consonants said above and /ʋ/) are lenited to become lenes (similar to voiced consonants), as in /ˈkʲilʲtɕʲː(ɘ)/ vs. /ˈkʲilʲdʑʲ(ɘ)/. Geminate consonants, however, does not experience the lenition. Also, the infix is unaffected by lenition ( → /kulkalaˈza/, not */kulɡalaˈza/). These voiced consonants are either transcribed with generic voiced consonants, or with caron below diacritic (/t̬/) as does. By the time of, geminate consonants began to be simplified to single ones after consonants, leaving pairs like /ˈkʲilʲtɕʲ(ɘ)/ “you would come” vs. /ˈkʲilʲdʑʲ(ɘ)/ “he came” as in above, making the voiced allophones become phonemic (this change was not reflected in the orthography, however).

Before /k/ and /χ/, /n/ becomes pronounced /ŋ/ (these phonemes were also voiced after /n/ to /ɡ/ and /ɣ/). The phoneme /n/ also becomes /ɲ/ before /tɕ/ (voiced to /dʑ/), regardless of the front vowel preceding or succeeding it.

Vowels
Front vowels (/e/, /je/, /ø̆/, /i/, /y/) may cause the preceding and succeeding consonants to be palatalized (мӗн */ˈmø̆n/ → /ˈmʲø̆ɲ/). The soft sign letter ⟨ь⟩ is used to palatalize a consonant without a front vowel, as some words like. Using substitutions for palatalized phonemes of /c/, /ɟ/, /ʎ/, /ɲ/, /ç/, and /ʝ/ (the last one is the expected voiced counterpart of /ç/); for /kʲ/, /ɡʲ/, /lʲ/, /nʲ/, /χʲ/, and /ɣʲ/, respectively; is allowed, but it is not recommended (except /ɲ/, /aˈnːʲe/ → /aˈɲːe/) to use these substitutions due to their uncertainty. In unstressed syllables, reduced vowels /ŏ/ and /ø̆/ becomes /ə/ and /ɘ/, and those vowels can be dropped in positions where it can be elided in fast speech ( → /ˈikːʲ(ɘ)/).

Stress
The position of Chuvash stress is predictable, as shown by these rules (stress are denoted by an acute accent):
 * 1) Most words are stressed in the last syllable.
 * 2) If the word ends with or the location of stress are expected on reduced vowels ⟨ӑ⟩ or ⟨ӗ⟩, the stress moves to the preceding syllable . Note that two sequences of final reduced vowels are rare and mainly exists in derived words.
 * 3) However, recent loans (mostly Russian, but not with old Russian loans) retains their original stress pattern.