Consonants

Unlike other orthographies of local languages in Indonesia (largely based on the standard orthography), the original Grand Valley Dani orthography (the current one might be not known) has j instead of y, in common with the Indonesian old spelling.

• The letters ⟨p, t, k⟩ are pronounced as aspirated /pʰ, tʰ, kʰ/ in word-initial position and as [β, ɾ, ɣ] in intervocalic positions, respectively. They merge with voiceless /p, t, k/ syllable-finally, which is also represented by graphic voiced consonants ⟨b, d, g⟩. However, aspirated consonants still occur intervocalically, see below.
• The phoneme /h/ merges with preceding or following phonemes:^[4]
  • It aspirates preceding ⟨p, t, k⟩, creating effectively phonemic aspirated consonants in intervocalic positions (japha /japʰa/ "they fought").
  • It also compensatorily lengthened adjacent vowel or sonorants (except /j/, /w/), however, one element of the most adjacent lengthened vowel to /h/ is devoiced (wamhe /wamhe/, [wamm̥ɛ] "pig (with connective morpheme)").

Vowels

Verbs

Verbs in Grand Valley Dani are highly inflected for many tenses. Infinitive is marked by the suffix -in, although verb stems in -s- change to -t- before consonants: wetasin "to roast", but wetathy "I roasted".