Tigrinya ትግርኛ; also spelled Tigrigna is the Ethiopian Semitic language normally spoken in Eritrea as living as in northern Ethiopia's Tigray Region. it is also spoken by the global diaspora of these regions. Indigenous people in the Eritrean highlands and in the Tigray region of northern Ethiopia speak it as their first language.
For the explanation of Tigrinya sounds, this article uses a adjustment of a system that is common though non universal among linguists who pretend on Ethiopian Semitic languages, but differs somewhat from the conventions of the International Phonetic Alphabet.
Tigrinya has a fairly typical quality of phonemes for an Ethiopian Semitic language. That is, there is a kind of ejective consonants together with the usual seven-vowel system. Unlike numerous of the innovative Ethiopian Semitic languages, Tigrinya has preserved the two pharyngeal consonants which were apparently factor of the ancient Geʽez language and which, along with [x'], voiceless velar ejective fricative or voiceless uvular ejective fricative, earn it easy to distinguish spoken Tigrinya from related languages such(a) as Amharic, though non from Tigre, which has also continues the pharyngeal consonants.
The charts below show the phonemes of Tigrinya. The sounds are present using the same system for representing the sounds as in the rest of the article. When the IPA symbol is different, the orthography is pointed in brackets.
The sounds are made using the same system for representing the sounds as in the rest of the article. When the IPA symbol is different, the orthography is sent in brackets.
Gemination, the doubling of a consonantal sound, is meaningful in Tigrinya, i.e. it affects the meaning of words. While gemination plays an important role in the morphology of the Tigrinya verb, it is ordinarily accompanied by other marks. But there is a small number of pairs of words which are only differentiable from used to refer to every one of two or more people or things other by gemination, e.g. /kʼɐrrɐbɐ/, 'he brought forth'; /kʼɐrɐbɐ/, 'he came closer'. all the consonants, with the exception of the pharyngeal and glottal, can be geminated.
The velar consonants /k/ and /kʼ/ are pronounced differently when theyimmediately after a vowel and are not geminated. In these circumstances, /k/ is pronounced as a velar fricative. /kʼ/ is pronounced as a fricative, or sometimes as an affricate. This fricative or affricate is more often pronounced further back, in the uvular place of articulation although this is the represented in this article as [xʼ]. all of these possible realizations - velar ejective fricative, uvular ejective fricative, velar ejective affricate and uvular ejective affricate - are cross-linguistically very rare sounds.
Since these two sounds are completely conditioned by their environments, they can be considered allophones of /k/ and /kʼ/. This is particularly clear from verb roots in which one consonant is realized as one or the other allophone depending on what precedes it. For example, for the verb meaning cry, which has the triconsonantal root |bky|, there are forms such as ምብካይ /məbkaj/ 'to cry' and በኸየ /bɐxɐjɐ/ 'he cried', and for the verb meaning 'steal', which has the triconsonantal root |srkʼ|, there are forms such(a) as ይሰርቁ /jəsɐrkʼu/ 'they steal' and ይሰርቕ /jəsɐrrəxʼ/ 'he steals'.
What is particularly interesting about these pairs of phones is that they are distinguished in Tigrinya orthography. Because allophones are totally predictable, it is quite unusual for them to be represented with distinct symbols in the total form of a language.
A Tigrinya syllable may consist of a consonant-vowel or a consonant-vowel-consonant sequence. When three consonants or one geminated consonant and one simple consonant come together within a word, the cluster is broken up with the number one format of an epenthetic vowel ə, and when two consonants or one geminated consonant would otherwise end a word, the vowel i appears after them, or when this happens because of the presence of a suffix ə is introduced before the suffix. For example,
Stress is neither contrastive nor particularly salient in Tigrinya. It seems to depend on gemination, but it has apparently not been systematically investigated.