Vowels

Whiteley (1958) lists the following vowel phonemes for Iraqw. All of the vowels except /ə/ occur in both short and long versions:

/o/ can be heard as [ə] within the environment of pharyngeal consonants.

Consonants

Whiteley (1958) and Mous (1993) list the following consonants:

In the popular orthography for Iraqw used in Lutheran and Catholic materials as well as in collections of traditional Iraqw stories^[3] and academic literature (e.g. Nordbustad 1988^[4] and Mous 1993^[5]), the majority of the orthography follows the Swahili orthography with the addition of x and q. Other additions to the orthography are the sound ɬ is spelled ⟨sl⟩, the tɬʼ is spelled ⟨tl⟩, the ħ is spelled ⟨hh⟩, and ʕ is spelled ⟨/⟩.^[6] Consonants /ɲ, tʃ, dʒ, ʃ/ mainly occur from loanwords of Swahili and Datooga.^[7]

Noun morphology

Construct case suffixes and gender linkers

The gender of a noun is important for predicting the construct case suffix and the gender linker that it will use. When a noun is directly followed by

• an adjective
• a possessive noun phrase
• a numeral
• a relative clause
• a verb

then a construct case suffix must appear after the noun. The construct case marker is ⟨-ú⟩ or ⟨-kú⟩ for masculine nouns; ⟨-^Hr⟩ or ⟨-tá⟩ for feminine nouns; and ⟨-á⟩ for neuter nouns:^[11]

The gender linkers are similar to the construct cases suffixes, but appear between the noun and other suffixes (such as the demonstrative, indefinite, and possessive suffixes). The following example shows masculine, feminine, and neuter nouns before the 'their' possessive suffix and the demonstrative ⟨-qá'⟩ 'that (far, but visible)'.^[12]

Adverbial case clitics

Iraqw has four adverbial case clitics: the directive, the ablative, the instrumental and the reason case clitics. Adverbial case clitics occur in the position immediately before the verb and are cliticised to the preceding noun with the gender linker, or they might occur in a position after the verb, in which case they are obligatorily followed by a resumptive pronoun alé.

Noun phrases

The noun comes first in the noun phrase, and precedes possessors, adjectives, numerals, and relative clauses. An element called the construct case suffix appears between the noun and these modifiers, as discussed in the Morphology section above:

Sentences

An Iraqw sentence contains a verb in final position, and an auxiliary-like element called the 'selector'. Either the subject or the object of the sentence may precede the selector,^[14] and the selector agrees with the preceding noun. So in the first example below, iri shows agreement with /ameenirdá' 'that woman', and in the second example, uná shows agreement with gitladá' :