We made heavy use of the anthropological sources listed in the bibliography but independently checked all information incorporated and used terminology listed in them only insofar as we could corroborate it.
The following chart gives the Cebuano phonemes and the articulation:
+--------------------------------------------------------------+ | Consonants | +---------------+--------+--------------+-------+------+-------+ | |bilabial|apico-alveolar|palatal|dorsal|glottal| | | | | | | | |voiceless stops| p | t | c | k | ʔ | |voiced stops | b | d | j | g | | |nasals | m | n | | ŋ | | |spirants | | s | | | h | |liquids | w | l, r | y | | | +---------------+--------+--------------+-------+------+-------+ | Vowels | +----------------------+---------------+-----------------------+ | high- or mid-front | low central | high- or mid-back | | i | a | u | +----------------------+---------------+-----------------------+
In addition there is a fourth mid-central vowel which occurs dialectally (Bohol, Southern Leyte, Southern Cebu, and other scattered areas) but is not found in the dialect of Cebu City and is not transcribed here. [7] The palatal stop /j/ in many dialects does not contrast with the cluster /dy/. In the dialect of the Camotes Islands there is also a voiced spirant /z/ which derives historically from /y/ but contrasts with /y/ currently.
Vowels may be long or short. Contrast between long and short vowels occurs only in the final and the penultimate syllable of the word: káun [kā́ʔun] ‘eat’ and nagdá [nagdā́] ‘is bringing’. Further, there is only one long vowel per word. There is also a phoneme of stress which has a very low contrastive function. For the most part stress can be determined by the phonological make-up of the word: 1 stress falls on the long vowel of the word if the word has a long vowel: nagdá [nagdā́], káun [kā́ʔun]. 2 for words that have no long vowel, stress is on the penultimate if it is closed: tan-aw [tánʔaw] ‘see’; mugbù [múgbuʔ] ‘short’. If the penultimate is open and short, stress is on the ultimate: mala [malá] ‘dry’. Occasionally, in words with a closed penult the final syllable is stressed (marked here with a wedge): mandǎr [mandár] ‘order’; dughǐt [dughít] ‘instrument for poking’. In words with a long vowel in the ultimate syllable there is, in some dialects, a contrast between the stress on the first mora and stress on the second mora of the long vowel: nahū́g [nahúug] ‘fell’; húg [huúg] ‘woof’. This contrast does not obtain in all dialects.