Phonology of Japanese
The vowels of Japanese
| Vowels | back | front | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| high aperture | a a: | |||
| medium aperture | o o: | e e: | ||
| small aperture | u u: | i i: | ||
The vowels a o e u i are short; a: o: e: u: i: are long.
The consonants of Japanese
| consonants | guttural | apical | labial | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| hard | soft | hard | soft | hard | soft | ||
| liquid | r | r | |||||
| nasal | n | n | m | m | |||
| fricative | unvoiced | s | s | ||||
| voiced | z | z | |||||
| plosive | unvoiced | k | k | t | t | p | p |
| voiced | g | g | d | d | b | b | |
The consonants h & h are isolated.
A consonant is soft when the back of the tongue rises towards the soft palate; one may hear the sound j but what distinguishes pa (ぱ) from pa (ぴゃ) is the hardness of the consonant and not a distinction between pa and pja like in the French words panneau et piano.
In Japanese all consonants are either hard or soft except before i and e where the soft-hard opposition is neutralized: they are always soft before i and always hard before e; what we observe in the hiragana and katakana syllabaries.
Unknown in French, Spanish, English or German, the softening correlation is met in Lithuanian, Latvian, Polish, Russian, Chinese, Japanese and Korean.