Phonological Inventory

Consonant Inventory

Sereer has a moderately large consonant inventory with 32 distinctive consonant phonemes. Strikingly, there are 21 phonemically distinctive oral stops. The consonant inventory makes use of some combinations of parameters that are unusual cross-linguistically, including contrastive voicing in both egressive and ingressive stops. Sereer also has multiple uvular phonemes, a rarity for sub-Saharan Africa. The consonant inventory is shown below. Working orthography for a given symbol is indicated in parentheses following a symbol if the orthography differs from the IPA.

Sereer Saalum Consonant Phonemes

		Labial	Alveolar	Palatal	Velar	Uvular	Glottal
	V'less	p	t	c	k	q	ʔ (')
	Voi.	b	d	ɟ (j)	g
Stops	Impl.	ɓ	ɗ	ʄ
	V'less Impl.	ƥ	ƭ	ƈ
	Prenas.	ᵐb (mb)	ⁿd (nd)	ᶮɟ (nj)	ᵑg (ng)	ᶰɢ (nq)
Nasal		m	n	ɲ (ñ)	ŋ
Fricative		f	s			χ (x)
Tap/Trill			r
Liquid			l
Glide		w		j (y)

Stops

Sereer has a highly unusual and large stop system, with 21 phonemic stops contrasting across six places of articulation (bilabial, alveolar, palatal, velar, uvular, and glottal). The size of the stops as a component of the consonantal phonological system can be attributed to the fact that Sereer distinguishes five manners of articulation in addition to six places: plain voiceless, plain voiced, prenasalized voiced, voiced implosive, and voiceless implosive. The latter stop manner is especially unusual cross-linguistically, and Sereer has a particularly unlikely system in that there are three voiceless implosives.

All five of these manners are found for the labial, alveolar, and palatal places of articulation. For the velar and uvular places of articulation, there are no ingressive stops; there is also no plain voiced velar stop. This is not entirely unexpected given what the Aerodynamic Voicing Constraint tells us about the antagonistic relationship between obstruency (closure) and voicing (airflow): stops that are articulated back further in the mouth will tend to have fewer manners of articulation that involve passive cavity expansion (e.g. to maintain voicing) simply because there is less cavity space to build up air pressure in. Once a threshold of pressure is reached, airflow ceases, and so does voicing. Sereer's uvulars and velars are entirely consistent with this model, given that the voiced segment present the furthest back (uvular /nq/) has prenasalization as a mechanism for maintaining continuous airflow despite the small cavity size.

Fricatives

Sereer has three voiceless fricatives: /f s χ/. The uvular fricative varies in the amount of frication it occurs with, and can sometimes approach [h]. This is especially true in fast speech and before front vowels.

Nasals

There are four nasal phonemes in Sereer at labial, alveolar, palatal, and velar places of articulation: /m n ɲ ŋ/.

Glides, Liquid, Tap/Trill

Sereer has two glide phonemes /w/ and /j/. There is an alveolar trill /r/ that surfaces as a tap [ɾ] in quick speech. There is also an alveolar lateral approximant /l/.

Glottal Stop

The glottal stop in Sereer is not contrastive word initially, as there are no minimal pairs in this position. ‘Vowel initial’ words are preceded by a glottal stop in careful speech, but it may be lost in fast speech. It is however, contrastive in other positions. For example, it distinguishes past tense forms from present tense forms for verbs: loolaam ‘I laugh(ed)’ vs. lool'aam ‘I laughed (longer ago)’. It is also contrastive word finally: gar ‘come’ vs. ga' ‘see’. Interestingly, Sereer distinguishes sequences of glottal stops across morpheme boundaries. The sequence [ʔʔ] results when a verb ending in /ʔ/ is takes the past tense suffix -/ʔ/-: ga'aam 'I see' vs. ga''aam 'I saw (longer ago)'.

Vowel Inventory

Sereer has a 5 vowel system that is contrastive for length:

			Front	Central	Back
High			i ii		u uu
Mid			e ee		o oo
Low				a aa

Serer vowels can be followed by approximants /j w/ in the syllable coda, giving off the initial impression that the language has diphthongs. This may or may not prove to be the case, but there is only one word in the lexicon (which may be exceptional or misinterpreted by me) transcribed with both a glide and another segment in the coda, mbaiɟ "blanket", which suggests that glides are in the coda given the CVC syllable we see everywhere else. Faytak 23:19, 3 October 2012 (UTC)

Notes:

• Vowels after implosive consonants are sometimes creaky; this, however, is not contrastive.
• /o/ is realized as [ɔ] in closed syllables. See [ɳaflɔx] "feces" (013) vs. [la:lo] "baobab leaf" (millet text).
• /e/ has a lax variant [ɛ] that also surfaces in closed syllables. See [sa:te] "town, village" vs. [je:jɛt] "insect".
• Vowel tenseness generally covaries with vowel length.

Suprasegmentals

Serer makes use of stress. (?) It is unclear at this point whether it is automatically/metrically assigned to words or if it is lexically specified and unpredictable. Faytak 22:19, 20 September 2012 (UTC)

Plural marker χa- (supposing that it is a separate morpheme) seems to attract stress in some instances (e.g. aˈlas "tail", ˈχalas "tails"). Faytak 01:40, 25 September 2012 (UTC)

Loanword Phonology

Borrowed words show phonemes that are not normally present in Serer, like /y/ in [myyr] 'wall' (Fr. mur), or /ʃ/ in [maʃin] 'machine, device' (Fr. machine). These phonemes are irregularly adapted to Sereer phonology, as has happened on occasion to "wall," which can be pronounced as [miir].