Appendix:Chuvash pronunciation

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

Between vowels, and after nasals (/m/, /n/), semivowels (/j/, /ʋ/), or liquids (/l/, /r/); stops, sibilants, and affricates (all consonants except five consonants said above and) are lenited to become lenes (similar to voiced consonants), as in килччӗ (kilččĕ, “you would come”) /ˈkʲilʲtɕʲː(ɘ)/ vs. килчӗ (kilč̬ĕ, “he came”) /ˈkʲilʲdʑʲ(ɘ)/. Geminate consonants, however, does not experience the lenition. Also, the infix -кала (-kala, “intensive and iterative infix”) is unaffected by lenition (кулкаласа (kulk̬alas̬a) → /kulkalaˈza/, not */kulɡalaˈza/). These voiced consonants are either transcribed with generic voiced consonants, or with caron below diacritic (/t̬/) as the Wikipedia article does. By the time of Russian Revolution, 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.

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 пыльчӑклӑ (pylʹčăklă /⁠ˈpɯlʲtɕʲəklə⁠/). 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/, анне (anne) /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 (иккӗ (ikkĕ) → /ˈikːʲ(ɘ)/).

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 (ву́т (vút), анне́ (anné)).
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 (и́ккӗ (íkkĕ), йы́вӑрлӑх (jývărlăh)). 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.