Qohenje Vowels
Qohenje has three kinds of vowel phoneme, all considered as unitary vowels in native phonology, and written with single symbols in the orthography.
Pure vowels
Qohenje has six "pure" (non-ballistic) vowels:
Broken vowels
The language has a set of fourteen "broken" or "glottalised" vowels. These are pairs of short pure vowels separated by a glottal stop:
The exact pronunciation of these vowels varies between the glottalised version given above, and a "creaky-voice" diphthong.
Diphthongs
There are also nine ballistic vowels, or diphthongs:
Vowel classes
The color coding on the vowel charts above indicates a functional distinction between primary vowels and secondary vowels, which is important in the Qohenje declension system. Primary vowels are those involving extreme peripheral qualities (a/i/u), while the secondaries have at least one centralised component (e/y/o). See Declensions for the utility of these groupings.
| primary | i | i'i | i'a | ia | a | a'i | ai | a'a | a'u | au | u | u'a | ua | u'u | ||
| secondary | e | e'i | ei | e'a | ea | y | y'i | yi | y'a | ya | y'u | yu | o | o'a | oa | o'u |
Vowel mutations
Qohenje does not tolerate certain vowel sequences, mandatorily converting them to an acceptable broken vowel target, as indicated in the following diagram (explanation below):
The central column in this diagram represents the acceptable broken vowel targets in the case of vowel collisions. Any vowel on the left, meeting any vowel on the right will coalesce as indicated into the correponding broken vowel in the central column.
A toneme on the second vowel will become the toneme for the fused broken vowel, hence ...a + ‘è... will become à'i. This phenomenon occurs at morpheme boundaries but is also visible within the declensions of certain words, for instance the word ("answer") in its Delayed (DEL) aspect has the form , although one might expect hi'oJóŋ, but the sequence -i'o- naturally mutates to -y'u-, and has become part of Qohenje spelling.