Xiri

Consonants
Some consonants have intervocalic allophones which are romanised separately for ease of reading, but which are not distinguished in the native script. /k/ is the only phoneme which technically cannot occur in intervocalic position, since it is neutralised into /ŋ/. The use of ⟨g⟩ to represent intervocalic underlying /k/ reflects the native script which usually spells such words using ⟨kV⟩.

Likewise, coda nasals are realised as nasalisation of the preceding vowel with no phonetic consonant but are still rendered as the underlying consonant in the romanisation and native script. For example, sām "if" and. fāń "moon" are realised as [sãː] and [fãː] respectively and may be analysed as /saːN/ and /faːN/.

Vowels
Most of the differences between the phonologies of the three historical stages of Xiri are in the vowel inventory, which underwent several characteristic shifts during the evolution of the language.

Early Xiri
The earliest form of Xiri that was distinct from its sister languages was spoken around 300 BGS. Early Xiri had a simple five-vowel system with contrastive length retained from Proto-Xiri. The mid vowels, e ē o ō, developed from Proto-Xiri diphthongs. In addition to the basic vowel inventory, certain sequences of syllables in Proto-Xiri gave rise to coda glides which appeared only in four diphthongs: ay [ai̯], aw [au̯], ey [ei̯], and ew [eu̯].

Middle Xiri
Xiri's vowel length was completely lost by the time of Middle Xiri, spoken around 200-500 AGS. The Early Xiri diphthongs monophthongised into three new long vowels:


 * ay [ai̯], ey [ei̯] → ē [eː]
 * aw [au̯] → ā [ɒː]
 * ew [eu̯] → ō [øː]

Short vowels in unstressed syllables took on distinctive more central realisations. Stress is often marked on short vowels with an acute accent in romanisation to highlight the difference in vowel quality.

Exodus Xiri
The stage of Xiri spoken by the refugees arriving in T'ugü after the Great Sickness in 655 AGS and subsequently throughout the Exodus Period is known as Exodus Xiri. The unstressed vowel allophones were phonemicised by the merger of unstressed [ɪ ʊ] and stressed [e o] into /e o/. The resulting inventory contrasts three vowel heights in the series /i e ɛ/ and /u o ɔ/, where /i u/ only occur in stressed syllables. /ɛ ɔ/ may occur in stressed syllables due to a shift in the long vowels: /eː øː ɒː/ → /ɛ ø ɔ/.

The inventory of front rounded vowels was also expanded through contact with Alöbi, introducing /y/ which was always stressed like /i/ and /u/. Unrounded vowels [a ɛ e i] were rounded to [ɔ œ ø y] by preceding /w/, which was additionally lost in unstressed syllables. For example, Middle Xiri kwíkwi [ˈkwi.kwɪ] "yams" becomes Exodus Xiri kwükö [ˈkwy.kø], through an intermediate stage [ˈkwi.kwe]. [ø] and [œ] form a complementary distribution in stressed and unstressed syllables respectively. It is possible that the distinction was marginally phonemic, since stressed [œ] could have formed via [ˈwei̯] → [ˈweː] → [ˈwɛ] → [ˈwœ], but no such examples are known.